The funeral plans were made by Eric himself in the presence of
his wife Lissy and the Dean of Stanford Memorial Church, Robert
Hamerton-Kelly, in Eric's room at the Stanford Hospital in
early December of 1984. I was also present. Eric said that he
wanted the Lutheran order to be followed for his funeral.

The readings he requested were verses 15-17 of chapter 2 of
the First Letter of John:

Do not love the world or the things in the world. If any one
loves the world, love for the Father is not in him.

For all that is in the world, the lust of the flesh and
the lust of the eyes and pride of life, is not of the Father
but is of the world.

And the world passes away, and the lust of it; but he who
does the will of God abides for ever.'

I remember Lissy asking Eric why those verses
(after Robert had read them aloud to us) and Eric answering
simply, 'for repentance.'

The gospel reading Eric wanted was even shorter, two verses,
24 and 25, in the 12th chapter of the Gospel of
John:

Truly, Truly, I say to you, unless a grain of wheat falls
into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it
bears much fruit.

He who loves his life loses it, and he who hates his life
in this world will keep it for eternal life.

The short funeral service with no more than a
dozen people present took place in the chapel of a funeral home
in Palo Alto a few days after Eric's death on January 19th [of
1985] at his home on the Stanford campus.

I was a doctoral student in psychology at the University of
Florida in the mid 70s when I found out that Voegelin was on
campus for three days giving a series of lectures. I dropped
everything in order to attend. At his first lecture, which was
comprised of mostly graduate students and faculty from the
history and philosophy departments, he was confronted by the
Dean of Graduate Studies regarding "this thing you call the two
poles of human existence". Voegelin went on to elaborate but
the Dean became exacerbated by what he was hearing. He
responded, somewhat irritably "I don't know how you can stand
there and claim that there are only two poles to human
existence. Why not five or six?" Voegelin paused a moment,
adjusted his glasses, and said in a very low voice: "I am sorry
to disappoint you."

Barry Cooper

A few years ago when visiting Erlangen, where the Voegelin
library is stored, I would on occasion borrow (quite illegally
as I am sure Juergen Gebhardt will note) Voegelin's detective
novels for the weekend. A very decent selection, some of which,
as I recall, were recommended by Juergen himself. Strauss was
also a big reader of this kind of literature, though no doubt
he called them policiers.

Juergen
Gebhardt

There is a remarkable difference between the "imagined"
Voegelin and the "real" Voegelin. The latter was not only keen
on reading modern "high brow" novels but had also a penchant
for "low brow" books, in particular he was an avid consumer of
detective stories -- his library being stocked with hundreds of
them.

I first met Eric Voegelin in 1940 or 1941 when he came to
Baton Rouge to lecture under the auspices of the department of
government at Louisiana State University. He may have given a
single lecture or a series, and the subject, I suppose, was
something that would be part of Order and History,
though that large work did not begin appearing for another
decade and a half. My first impression of Voegelin was of a
speaker of great dignity and ease, of vast learning easily
borne and not trimmed to please a general audience, of
formality and yet graciousness. Here was a philosopher who had
no marks of either the pedant or the popularizer; the gentleman
as thinker. Despite a highly technical vocabulary and
occasional, but not intrusive, problems of idiom and accent,
Voegelin seemed comfortable and fluent in American English.
During his stay in Baton Rouge, Eric--I use an informality that
was slow to develop--attended a meeting of a faculty discussion
group at which I was also present, whether as visitor or
regular attendant (I am relying entirely on memory; I have no
file of documents, formal or informal, to consult). I remember
vividly the type, though not the specifics, of the argument
that broke out there between him and several of my colleagues.
The latter were depending, as faculties often do, on the
fundamental rightness of the current beliefs of social and
political liberalism, and no doubt Eric challenged one or more
of these; it was not that he was antiliberal in principle, but
that he was a vigilant challenger of the going cliches of both
left and right. Perhaps his point was that Hitler and Nazism
represented less a violation of American democratic ideas than
an enduring disorder of a distinguishable philosophical and
theological type. I do not remember the details, but I do
retain a strong impression that my colleagues, several of whom
were my good friends, were badly though unknowingly
overmatched.

Early during the 1941-1942 academic year there came the
news, exciting to all of us who had been greatly impressed by
Eric during his visit, that he had accepted a position in the
LSU department of government (it had not yet become the
department of political science: Bob Harris, then chair, always
insisted that the field was not a science) and would arrive in
Baton Rouge for the spring semester. Eric's coming seemed to us
a major institutional coup, another step toward LSU's realizing
a potential that had become evident in various ways. One of the
best agents of that potential was Bob Harris: he had an
excellent eye for professional quality and, though not a
theorist in the Voegelin mold, fully appreciated Voegelin's
gifts. Eric would have arrived in January, and I got acquainted
with him, I believe, not long after that (my uncertainty about
this became an issue during Eric's naturalization proceedings
in 1944, a matter that belongs to a later part of this
narrative). My wife and I probably met the Voegelins through
the Heberles, refugees who had arrived in 1938; Rudolf, a
sociologist, had been at Kiel, and his wife, Franziska, was the
daughter of the eminent sociologist Ferdinand Toennies.

My wife and I found both couples congenial socially. The men
were splendid additions to the faculty, and the wives were
superior people; they all remained tactfully silent about
whatever differences they found between Vienna and Kiel, on one
hand, and Baton Rouge on the other. We made special efforts;
not only did we want them to feel at home at LSU, but we could
imagine their problems in adjusting to a new culture and in
having to use a new language. We thought of the daunting
difficulties we would face as American refugees in Europe: the
problem not only of a new culture but of trying to make a
functioning daily tongue out of our graduate-school French or
German. We wanted things to work out for the Voegelins and
Heberles and hoped that welcoming natives might be helpful.

As northerners we too had at first felt like foreigners in
Baton Rouge. We had since come to feel very much at home and no
doubt felt that, as outsiders-turned-insiders, we would be
useful interpreters of the Louisiana mode of American life. In
one way, of course, we were doomed to failure: our academic
German in no way equipped us to speak and understand the
conversational language--a skill that might have temporarily
relieved the refugees' burden of having to manage all
communication in a second language. They would occasionally
fall into German, especially if they had guests whose first
language it was. When we were the only monolinguals present, we
would sometimes leave early to free the rest for the pleasure
of speaking their native tongue without having to be concerned
about excluding the two anglophones present.

In time we came to use first names. This did not happen
rapidly, for society had not yet reached today's stage of
instant, obligatory informality, and as individuals we were
disinclined to a stylistic intimacy that had not been earned by
experience. Perhaps it was we who, as spokesmen for the native
mores--we had drifted into the role without seeking
it--proposed the use of first names. I mention this because
Eric admitted that he found it difficult to call me "Bob,"
which seemed to him too trivial a vocative to apply to an adult
who was at least nominally a scholar. I suppose he got used to
it, but for some time he found "Robert" more bearable.

We tended to drift together at parties. As Lissy Voegelin
said to me years later, "Eric had no small talk." When
conversation was called for, he tended to launch into a
disquisition on whatever technical issue he was thinking
through as he composed Order and History. To an
auditor not equipped for such discourse, Eric might have seemed
to be exhibiting learning inappropriately or even engaging in a
put-down. But anyone who read him thus was utterly wrong. Eric
was a considerate man who in social circumstances--as opposed
to formal debate, in which no holds would be barred--would
never consciously speak in a condescending or indecorous way.
He had a strong sense of the proprieties, the decencies, the
observances that marked civilized people, and he was incapable
of vulgarity, whether in the guise of unrestrained egoism or of
simple commonplace-ness. If one lacks small talk, at a social
occasion one talks about the larger things familiar to him,
taking for granted the adequacy of the hearer to the heard.
Eric did not monologue. He would make a statement about what
interested him and seek responses. He assumed the auditor's
competence; he did not talk down to others by sticking to the
quotidian or simplifying an issue. Responses were likely to be
halfhearted or vague if Eric spoke about, say, the
late-medieval origins of the concept of the Third Reich, or the
spiritual breakthrough achieved by monotheistic thought, or the
derivation of some current political idea from an error by
Hegel. He tended to treat his colleagues precisely as if they
were fellow members of the philosophy faculty at the University
of Vienna. Whatever our professional competence, we were for
the most part not quite up to the role. What many of us felt
was less resentment than a regretful sense of not being with
it, and of wanting the ease of more reassuring company.
(Insofar as I may have felt that, the feeling was more than
counterbalanced by the awareness of being in the presence of an
extraordinary man.) Some people were so defeated by Eric's
intellectual superiority that they just wished he'd go away.
But he never indulged in derogation, and he tended not to
introduce topics he knew would be unwelcome. He was a man of
great punctilio. But if controversial topics came up, he did
not hesitate to challenge the cliches he heard bandied about.
After all, in Vienna he had vigorously attacked rightists even
when it was dangerous to do so (in his case it had been
life-threatening, and it led to exile). Here in the land of
free speech it seemed natural to challenge ideas on the other
end of the political spectrum when they seemed inadequate.
Obviously, a man who at best was hard to understand and who
dared to question long-held secular faiths was not always easy
to take.

What precedes may suggest that Eric generated only negative
reactions. But there were colleagues who, instead of fleeing or
being captious, were admiring and devoted and willing to listen
and to learn. They might not, however, always be present at
parties or handy at given moments. So Eric tended, at social
events, to become a solitary, not looking disgruntled or
censorious or troubled or neglected, but with his ordinarily
pleasant mien--he had a genial air, but with the geniality
modified by a certain formality--falling into an expressionless
neutrality: registering not bad temper but a sense, somewhat
escaping an effort of concealment, that though this kind of
sociability had its place and had to be endured (Eric always
had a strong sense of obligation), it was still not the most
satisfying way of spending several hours. He seemed to be
masking discontent or disappointment under an air of
detachment. He was not ungracious, but he was genuinely
courtly, and that meant that he registered social obligations
in a formal key, different from the folksy American geniality
based on the exchange of uncontentious trivialities. He was not
contemptuous of this American style of social intercourse, but
it was not for him a natural way of doing things. Eric was
always a thinker before he was a social being.

All this is part of a historical picture of Eric Voegelin,
but it also serves to introduce an account of my own relations
with him. When I said that we tended to drift together at
parties, I was not defining myself as his equal or as
intellectually superior to our colleagues. In me Eric excited a
respect bordering on veneration, for I recognized in him the
most extraordinary intellect I had ever encountered, one I
could in no way keep up with, especially in the abstruse
philosophical matters that could come up spontaneously in any
conversation. Although the spirit was willing, the mental flesh
was weak. But my good luck was that Eric had as it were
established me in a role in which I felt some competence--that,
to borrow a term from anthropology, of "native informant."
(This is not, of course, to claim exclusive possession of a
role that was shared by Bob Harris, Cleanth Brooks, and others
who had discovered some congeniality with Eric.) As a
non-southerner I might be expected to understand the questions
that would occur to another outsider experiencing the Deep
South for the first time; in a sense we were foreigners
together. But by 1942 I had been in Louisiana for seven years,
and I could speak also as an insider. I could act as the
interpreter of academic folkways that were unfamiliar to a
European-trained scholar. And I knew members of the faculty
well enough--LSU was still a relatively small university--to be
able to characterize people and to make judgments on their
talent, zeal, and professional accomplishment (no doubt with a
dash of that free-swinging, confident finality to which one is
liable in one's thirties). But the local scene was only a
temporary object of inquiry; Eric was more curious about the
general habits of American academe--everything from
institutional governance to habits of thought to philosophical
positions; types of administrative personnel and attitudes;
power bases; relations to the outside world; sense of mission
and sense of profit; and so on. He knew a great deal about the
materia of various fields--the arts, music, history,
literature, and of course philosophy--and he was curious about
the academic management of these. He would ask about
historiographic and critical practices in literature, and often
about specific writers: their styles, beliefs, current status
in academic esteem; and about individual works and their
reputations. His knowledge of literature in English was wide,
and he often asked searching questions. These questions, which
showed a range of knowledge rare in the practitioners of
nonliterary fields, tested the abilities of the informant, whom
Eric could praise, assist, and of course challenge.

Praise: he once told me that I could and did answer
questions that remained unanswered when he directed them to
other professors of literature. This puzzled me, for any
competent Ph.D. should have been able to deal with most of his
inquiries, which by and large concerned central, mainline
matters. I can still hear him saying, "They do not answer my
questions." I remember his delight when he came across some
work he had not known before, such as Ben Jonson's The
Alchemist: this play indicated to him an English
awareness of, or even tie-in with, the alchemical thought in
which Eric had some interest as an aspect of the history of
philosophy.

Assist: he asked many questions about Shakespeare, and my
task was to describe the kinds of scholarly activity practiced
by Shakespeareans. I made one sweeping statement--I have
forgotten what--about Shakespeareans' habits, and Eric promptly
asked what specific person did this sort of thing. When I could
not pin down my generalization with an example, he gracefully
covered for me: "Ah, it is in the air." This is a phrase I have
often found convenient. Now and then, despite his moving
primarily in a terminological world of European philosophical
practice, he would come up with a simple and useful phrase with
an Anglo-Saxon base, for example, "free-floating hatred."

Challenge: Eric had a deft way of indicating doubt about
some of my judgments and procedures. In analyzing plays and
novels I tended to look for the springs of human conduct--the
motives, "drives," needs of characters in interplay with one
another. It was distressing, then, to discover that Eric
considered "psychological" analysis a distinctly inferior mode
of criticism. What went on in literature was for him an
interplay of philosophical issues and spiritual forces, a clash
of symbols rather than a confrontation of psyches. In my later
work this view may have somewhat colored my sense of what went
on in narratives, but I was not really equipped to see things
in Eric's way. Still, I shall never forget the air of innocent
and amiable curiosity with which he raised literary questions,
and his brief interpositions, ironic but not biting.

He would occasionally ask about specific writers. In the
late 1940s he observed that much critical discussion of Henry
James was going on, and asked what he should read by way of
introduction to James. I had been teaching and writing about
The Turn of the Screw, and I suggested it. Eric
read it immediately--in one sitting, I believe--and wrote me a
very long reply (an essay-length letter) interpreting the novel
as a study of American Puritanism in which the dramatic actors
are God, the Soul, and Ordinary Life (the uncle, the governess,
and the housekeeper, respectively). He gave The
Turn the highest possible praise when he told me that
had he known it when he wrote a book about America after his
first visit here, in the 1920s, the book would have been
different. I say no more about the subject here because
fortunately Eric's letter-essay, with modifications he made
several decades later, reached print. [1]

At the same time that he was asking me questions about
literature in English, he was making occasional efforts to
educate me about European works; he would recommend novels
available in translation. One of these was Hermann Broch's
The Death of Virgil (I remember his especially
praising a "philosophy of laughter" found in that book), and I
was sufficiently struck by it to publish a review. Once he
urged me to study, if not indeed to memorize, the chapter
headings of a volume that would clue me in to how one went
about the study of metaphysics. The captions were in German,
alas, and I failed the assignment. But Eric was forgiving, and
he went on acting as if I were capable of philosophical
redemption, despite his inevitable awareness that I was an
inadequately endowed pupil.

Our relations with the Voegelins took a special turn in the
summer of 1944, when they were in Cambridge, Massachusetts: as
in many summers, Eric was working in the library at Harvard.
During their absence from Baton Rouge, the rented house in
which they had been living was leased or sold out from under
them, this in accordance with a wartime regulation that
permitted the dispossession of occupants if the premises were
then to be occupied by the owners or members of their family.
This must have been another severe blow to people who, after
the troubles that led to their flight from Austria, might have
felt they were beginning to get a foothold in America. They
evidently felt that they could not contest what amounted to an
eviction. It would have been costly; as "foreigners" (though
naturalization was imminent, they had not yet gone through it)
they would have been at a disadvantage in a legal dispute; and
Eric desperately needed all the time he could get at Harvard on
materials unavailable at LSU. Had they made the long and
expensive trip back to Baton Rouge, they might not have been
able to find other rental housing. Apparently the only solution
was to buy a house, provided a suitable one could be found for
sale. At this point they phoned us and asked us to buy a house
for them, that is, to find one for sale, commit them to buying
it, and perhaps put down (I'm not sure about this) some earnest
money. This was a forbidding assignment; picking out a house
for someone else could never be easy, and for people of the
Voegelins' fine taste it seemed close to impossible. The
Voegelins could be stuck with a house of which their undying
thought might be, "Couldn't Ruth and Bob do better than this?"
But however it might come out, our taking the assignment must
have seemed, in the exigencies of a wartime world, a lesser
evil than any other course . . . and we did take it on.
Although I say "we," the task fell largely to my wife, Ruth.
One reason was that I was teaching full-time in summer school
(fifteen hours a week then, and no trace of the cooling systems
that have since become standard equipment in Baton Rouge), an
annual necessity to keep us financially afloat; the more
significant one was that Ruth was much better than I at amateur
realty. I no longer know what her research method was, or how
long she worked at it, but I do recall that she uncovered only
two houses for sale. We may have looked at both houses, or it
may have been, as I suspect, that one of the two was so
obviously inferior that it dropped out of consideration. The
remaining one was no gem, but it would do, or rather would have
to do. Because it was really the only one available, we at
least escaped the burden of seeming to have made a sorry
choice. We signed for it and phoned the Voegelins with the
news.

Lissy came down by train to take care of the paperwork; I
believe they borrowed the money for the trip as well as for the
down payment (in fleeing the Nazis, they had to leave Vienna
without either possessions or cash). My impression is that the
house cost six or seven thousand (for comparison: I was an
associate professor then, and my salary was, I think, a little
more than three thousand; Eric's was probably somewhat, but not
much, more than that). Later, with a frankness in financial
matters that was characteristic, Eric said he had received a
loan from a relatively well-off refugee, a Jewish businessman,
I believe.

If Lissy's heart sank when she saw their new home, she
concealed the fact well (I can imagine the Voegelins having a
mental picture of a modern house on a good-sized lot in an
attractive neighborhood, a house such as the Heberles had by
now acquired). Fortunately, the Voegelins' fine taste was
balanced by a sense of reality. The house we found was roughly
downtown, on a narrow street a few blocks east of the central
shopping section. The names Canal and Cherry come to mind, but
I would not bet on either; whatever its name, the street on
which the Voegelin house stood was wiped out by the new freeway
that, curving in from the north and east, took over the area.
As I remember it, the area was, if not outright crummy, at
least wholly undistinguished: a sequence of narrow houses on
narrow lots on a narrow street. But Lissy Voegelin made that
house into a very charming place; we were occasional guests in
it, and after we left LSU we once spent a week there. This was
early one summer--in 1953, I think--after the Voegelins had
left for what had become a standard summer research stay in
Cambridge. We could see the works of art that were an important
part of the transformation, and we could see (and use) the
large tub in which, we were told, Eric sat for hours in cold
water, smoking the cigars he was fond of and working with
papers and books arranged on a board spanning the tub. Lissy
contributed to his writing by trying to maintain favorable
working conditions; she was a noise-abatement society of one,
campaigning in particular against kids whose habitual hollering
disturbed Eric's flow of thought. It must have seemed very odd,
in a neighborhood where reading, if any, probably did not go
beyond the daily papers and where books would have seemed
strange objects stored in libraries, to be told that a new
neighbor, suspect anyway, was actually writing a book
and needed a quiet atmosphere in which to carry on this
peculiar practice. You never could tell about foreigners.

Whatever problems there may have been--and I never heard any
report of hostility (even during a war when the Voegelins'
marked accents might have aroused suspicion in some segments of
the American public)--they lived in that house from 1944 to
1958, when they returned to Europe for what would be a stay of
some years.

Aside from the housing problem, another significant event
occurred in 1944: Eric's naturalization as an American citizen.
I was his designated witness, the citizen whom the immigration
authorities would quiz about the applicant's political and
personal reliability. But before we got to the crucial moment
of the hearing, there was a rather long period of preparation,
during which Eric asked me some routine questions. One big
issue did arise, having to do with a training booklet provided
to would-be citizens by the division of naturalization. Eric
would of course know its contents by heart. One day he asked
me, "If the answers in the handbook are wrong, should I give
the right answers or say what the handbook says?" Anyone with
knowledge of officialdom will know what my answer was: "You say
what the book says, even though you are sure you are telling a
lie. If you correct an official publication of a government
bureau, they will surely take you to be an unreformed Nazi, a
Communist agent, or else a professional troublemaker." The
situation was this: the handbook summarized various matters the
candidate was supposed to know about--the Constitution, the
Bill of Rights, and legislation having to do with the duties of
citizenship. Eric did not rely on this secondhand version. As a
political scientist, he read the originals, which of course he
saw through a highly trained professional eye; hence his sense
that the handbook, meant for a diverse and unread laity, fell
into technical inaccuracies or at least approximations of
dubious reliability.

I was present during part of Eric's naturalization
interview, where he conducted himself in a becomingly low-key
way and without bursts of learning that might alarm the board.
He passed without difficulty. I also underwent a private
questioning. In general it had to do with Eric's potential for
good citizenship, and of course I could be enthusiastic. I
recall few details, but I do remember one large and unexpected
stumbling block. I was asked how long I had known Eric or, more
precisely, just when our acquaintance had begun. The exchange
went approximately like this:

RBH: Well, let's see, he came to LSU in 1942. Let's
say about two years.Naturalization Officer: You must be more
specific.RBH: Well, he came here from Alabama for our second
semester. So I met him sometime in the first half of
1942.N.O.: You must be more specific.RBH. Since he came for the spring semester, he would
have arrived in Baton Rouge in late January or early
February. I met him not long after that.N.O.: You must be more specific.RBH: I probably met him sometime in February.N.O.: That is too general.RBH: Well, let's say I met him February 16.

The interrogator had the satisfied look of an
examining attorney who has at last elicited an essential fact
from a well-meaning but none-too-sharp witness. My last
statement settled things. Later Eric told me that the officer
had told him, "You had a very good witness. Professors usually
aren't good about details. They tend to be vague, especially
about dates. But Heilman really had the facts at his
fingertips."

Over time, Eric had become known as a faculty member of
extraordinary knowledge, insight, and depth. But he had none of
the feeling for easy or popular targets needed to create the
spellbinder who elicits volumes of praise from students and
garners teaching prizes. He was uniformly admired by the best
students rather than being widely popular. He never tried to
gratify or to upset auditors; rather, he wanted to expound
ideas, which might do either. His aim was understanding, not
approbation or the making of converts. Once he told me of a
woman student upset by his presentations of political theory;
she felt that his ideas raised unnecessary difficulties and
underrated a success-marked actuality. Eric gave her an
opportunity to tell what she would prefer. She said she just
wanted to be "happy." What, Eric asked, did it take to produce
happiness? She said, "I just want to be married, and have a
family and a house and a car and a radio." In reporting this to
me Eric was wondering how widespread her attitude was and, if
it was a sound representative of American thought, how we had
managed to last as long as we had. Eric was grateful for an
American refuge, and he never evinced any European snobbery;
but he would never hesitate to make a point that might
displease chauvinists, those who took the status quo to be the
ultimate social and moral achievement.

Eric was the ideal colleague for those special cases in
which a student advisee would seek not to have his requirements
met as quickly and easily as possible, but to be sent to the
best minds on the faculty. That sort of thing does happen
occasionally in academe, and it was wonderful to have an Eric
to recommend to such seekers. He was quietly admired despite
the difficulty of intricate and unfamiliar concepts. I have the
impression--though I have no solid evidence on this--that when
Eric offered a law school course in natural law, student
responses were marked by the feeling that though these ideas
had the merit of unusualness and depth, their connection with
litigation was not altogether clear.

Eric not only attracted the best students, but he aroused
the interest of townspeople drawn by the new intellectual
range. Among these were my wife (who had also audited a course
given by Cleanth Brooks) and Dorothy Blanchard (a sister-in-law
of Mrs. Brooks), who one year sat in on Voegelin's course in
Nietzsche. I got many reports on the flow of ideas, on student
reactions, and occasionally on terminological problems. Eric's
English was fluent, but the language was highly technical, the
idioms came from philosophical vocabularies, and now and then a
pronunciation was European--a source of an occasional problem
that was more amusing than deeply vexing. The class heard about
the Greek divinities "Ahtaynah" and "Tsoiss," and from context
soon identified them as the goddess of wisdom and the head
Olympian. But an apparently common noun, "wahzy," remained an
unsolved mystery for weeks. Puzzlement was widespread. Because
"wahzy" seemed to have aquatic connotations, the semifamiliar
wadi came to mind, and the association seemed fitting: the word
seemed to come up in contexts of the transmission of cultural
influences through desert lands. But enlightenment had to come
from Eric himself, who, questioned by students, explained, "Oh,
you know, a watering spot in the desert." Oasis.

But problems of pronunciation were transitory and minor.
Eric would ask me about them occasionally, and he caught on
quickly to the representations of sound, inconsistent as they
are, in English orthography. We moved on quickly from such
mechanical matters. My longer-term role was that of explicator
of American academic English, and finally I became a sort of
consultant on Eric's own formal use of English (he had started
writing his books and articles in English--surely the most
difficult of the leaps into the New World). In time Eric asked
me to read the typescripts of articles, reviews, and the like,
and finally the texts of volumes that would become parts of
Order and History. He particularly wanted me to
catch slips in idiom. In one book he kindly included a
paragraph to the effect that my influence upon his English had
been beneficent. I wished that might be true, but I tried to
avoid deceiving myself.

Being Eric's consultant on style was flattering but
difficult. My philosophical shortcomings often left me feeling
insecure in suggestions I wanted to make. I would see apparent
problems in idiom, phrasings not in accord with the
expectations of readers in English, locutions I felt to be
literal translations of German idioms that, when Englished,
still did not become English; but when I broached the subject,
I would find that the way he had put the matter seemed to Eric
essential to the accurate communication of his thought. In such
cases I was not only failing to help Eric, but also causing him
the additional labor of explaining his intent to a well-meaning
but philosophically defective copyeditor. What I always hoped
for, of course, was conspicuous and unmistakable derangements
of idiom, the correction of which would make me look
competently helpful rather than conceptually hopeless. Little
luck of that kind. I can still hear his "But you see, Bob
..."

A reviewer of one of Eric's later books declared it a pity
that Voegelin had given up writing in English. What the
reviewer meant was that Eric's basic technical vocabulary and
idioms were not always in line with standard academic English.
I can understand this criticism, provided that it is aimed at
stylistic mannerisms and is not used as a defense mechanism
against his thought. For instance, "tension toward," a phrase
Eric frequently used, seems to me not to work well because it
runs counter to anglophone expectations with regard to
"tension." But such views are not necessarily shared by readers
of greater philosophical expertise.

I have already alluded to Eric's strong, nearly fastidious,
sense of decorum. What was true of social relations was even
more true of professional ones. When I dedicated a book to
him--an essay on the relation of language and drama in
Othello--he commented on the volume with a fullness, and with
an appreciativeness of the intended honor, matched by no other
dedicatee. His response took the form of a letter of two or
three pages, single-spaced, which gave a handsome account of
what he took the book to be doing. His reservations about my
conclusions were so gracefully embedded in the descriptive text
that I would have been able to ignore them had I wished to do
so. I did not wish to, certainly, but by then I knew I was
incapable of reshaping my critical praxis to make it less
distant from the Voegelin ideal. I recognized that I
instinctively fell into psychological criticism, of which--as
I've said--Eric disapproved.

In 1948 Ruth and I left for Seattle, and after that Eric and
I exchanged letters regularly, if not frequently (as did our
wives). The correspondence continued when the Voegelins
returned to Europe in 1958. Eric had accepted the directorship
of the Bavarian state political science institute in Munich.
This was a professional advancement, I suppose, but it never
seemed to me that Eric suffered from the institutional angst so
common among American professors. He thought about his work; in
no way did his status, or his sense of achievement, depend upon
what post he held or what university he served in. So though
the Munich post may well have seemed a promotion, I imagine
that his motivating influence in taking it was the strong pull
of Europe after twenty years away, and of the Voegelins' native
language.

They must have crossed the ocean about the time we were
returning from a 1957-1958 sabbatical. When we returned to
Europe in 1964-1965, the Voegelins generously asked us to
visit. Eric invited me to speak at a seminar of his, and he
also managed--against what resistance I know not--to encourage
the department of English to sponsor a lecture by me. The chair
of English was Wolfgang Clemen, and since we had both
trafficked somewhat in Shakespearean imagery, there were
grounds for our finding ourselves at least mildly simpatico.
Then I received a letter--a sort of warning I took it to
be--from a member of the Munich faculty who had taken his Ph.D.
in our department at the University of Washington, where, the
gifted son of an immigrant family, he had established himself
both as a superior student and as a talented one-upper. The
burden of his letter--we had had no prior correspondence--was
that the department of English at Munich was "sophisticated,"
and that a visitor would want to mind his p's and q's lest he
betray provincialisms that might embarrass him. Oh dear, I
thought, I am in danger of disgracing not only myself but my
sponsor, Eric. Well, I spoke to Eric's seminar--a seminar in
some phase of political science--no doubt on some aspect of
tragedy, the subject of a book I was working on, and had a
vague sense, not too illusory I hoped, of having got by without
betraying an appalling failure of sophistication (even though I
had to speak in English, as the students were more at ease in
it than I would have been in German). Eric had told me that he
wanted his students to see what a competent American academic
looked like. There may have been an implied contrast with the
Munich professoriat, our impression of whom, conveyed largely
in letters from Lissy, was of complacent, humorless,
domineering types, very different from the gentility the
Voegelins remembered in their Vienna colleagues.

The story might be better if I remembered the subject of my
general lecture for the department of English, but I have
blacked out the formal occasion. My recollections begin with
the postlecture chitchat: Professor Clemen told the Voegelins
and Heilmans he had arranged no social affair, and he suggested
that we take off in cars for a public park where desired
refreshments could be ordered. Off we went, an unorganized and
uncertain medley of faculty, students, and others; there was
little or no coherence among the twenty or thirty people who
made up the park delegation. Feeling ill at ease in the
what-do-we-do-next air from which no one seemed exempt, I
latched onto several graduate students, proposed that we sit
together, and asked them to order--the bill to me--whatever
beer they liked and whatever food would go with it: cheese,
chips, sausages, and so on. I no longer remember whether I paid
or whether Clemen stopped by to pick up the check. I was trying
to make conversation while observing Eric and Lissy walking
around like lost souls, she looking thunderous and Eric
grinning in a most singular fashion, as if this were an
especially gratifying occasion. It wasn't long before Clemen
stopped by to whisper a request in my ear: if I declared I was
tired, this would enable him to flee, as he would like to do,
because he took no pleasure in being here and could think of
other things he would prefer to do. By then I may have been a
little annoyed, and disinclined to play further the role of
idiot boy to all these "sophisticates," but all voluntary
action was suddenly ruled out by the onset of a thunderstorm.
We were sitting in an insubstantial enclosure, I think under a
light cloth or canvas covering that temporarily resisted the
downpour, but the sides were open, and the storm blew through.
Retreat was mandatory, and everyone had to hurry toward parking
areas that seemed some distance away. Lissy, who did all the
driving, had to dash through the rain for their car. From
somewhere there was an umbrella available for the other three
of us as we struggled through the rain. We got back to the
Voegelins' apartment and chatted and had drinks during the
drying-out process. Lissy's displeasure with the evening now
expressed itself in denunciations of a social style she saw as
a violation of all European, and especially Viennese,
decencies. Eric continued to smile, delighted, it seems, by an
unforeseen confirmation of his suspicions. As he put it, "I
knew that something was wrong with the department of English,
but it is much worse than I thought."

The Voegelins were wonderful hosts and took us to see
everything that should be seen by visitors to Munich--museums,
churches, political and historical sites, restaurants. At all
such spots Eric spoke with great ease and informality, a guide
in control of all pertinent information, aesthetic and
historical. One occasion brought out a response I had never
seen in him: anger. A doorman or waiter was either inattentive
or outright rude, and Eric grew furious. He told the man off,
emphatically but not coarsely, and we went on our way. But his
resentment at bad style was perceptible for quite a while.

In time the Voegelins wearied of Munich; my impression,
gained from other sources, is that the disruptiveness of
dogmatic student Marxists--a boorish tactic we have seen in
this country--made Eric's educational mission seem excessively
difficult. I never asked about this. In the late 1960s they
returned to the States and made a permanent home in California.
Eric was for a while a fellow of the Hoover Institute in Palo
Alto. After he left the institute, Eric told me that the
officials there were overly concerned with opposition to
communism; Eric felt, if my inferences are correct, that this
opposition committed resources and energies against an ideology
he already saw as doomed. We began to see the Voegelins
regularly again, for our son and his family lived in Palo Alto,
and we had a pied-a-terre there. I remember well the July day
in 1969 when we four were at my son's house, along with my son
and his family, watching the TV broadcast of the moon landing.
I had expected Eric to be uninterested or even in a skeptical
or debunking frame of mind, but he seemed no less fascinated by
the lunar scenes than the rest of us.

Before coming to the ending of the tale, I want to record a
few impressions that may not be attached to specific events. As
I have indicated more than once, I lacked the philosophical
equipment to engage in activities that turned on technical
consideration or application of Voegelin's thought. (In
contrast, Cleanth Brooks--a friend of both of us--made use of a
Voegelin idea in an essay on Walker Percy.) But one kept
picking up snippets that might influence one's thought or
writing. I always noticed Eric's use of the word
science in the general sense of "knowledge";
repeatedly he would say something like, "Don't let the lab boys
get away with monopolizing that word," that is, limiting its
applicability to the management of aspects of physical reality
instead of to the treatment of essence by philosophy. Thus he
was always providing his listener with conceptual tools that
were not necessarily part of his systematic thought. His sense
of the varieties of religious experience--he once spoke about
"the atheist religion"--was always present to me as I was
working out the implications of the picaresque heart of Thomas
Mann's brilliant Felix Krull. His idea of the
"deformed community" directly influenced my sense of what goes
on in Walter Van Tilburg Clark's The Ox-Bow
Incident.

What I was doing was picking up individual ideas from
printed or spoken word and using them to enlighten artistic
practices rather than ingesting a philosophical system and
letting it determine point of view. "System": my colleague
Eugene Webb once told me he had given up studying Voegelin
because the latter was "not a systematic philosopher." When I
mentioned this to Cleanth Brooks, Cleanth replied that if Eric
heard this complaint, he would say, "I'm pursuing truth, not
constructing a system." Webb has, fortunately, since resumed
his study of Voegelin.

After leaving the Hoover Institute, Eric, needing income,
took up the study of the stock market. (I am assuming this
chronology; I cannot vouch for it.) He undertook this intense
research in his sixties, when many people opt for retirement.
Eric did very well in this new venture; he told me once that it
took him about two hours a day to spot and keep up with the
trends that dictated buying and selling, and after his death
Lissy told me that she had been left in a very comfortable
financial situation. A lifetime as a profound theorist did not
diminish his awareness of how the ordinary world goes and of
how to survive in it; he accepted, so to speak, the ways of the
world, as long as that acceptance did not run counter to his
sense of what was fitting. Once Lissy got the notion that one
had to be a church member to undergo funeral rites; Eric said,
matter-of-factly, "All right, we will join a church then."

Although he could be sharply critical of American ways of
doing things, Eric did not stint on praise when he felt it was
due. He thought, for example, that American medical practice
was superior to European. In the late sixties or early
seventies, after he and Lissy had both had major surgery in
Palo Alto, he said, "If we had stayed in Vienna, we would both
be dead by now." After Lissy's surgery, Eric dashed to the
hospital with the most elaborate bouquet he could find; he had
laid hands on it at a florist's where it was part (it was an
artificial bouquet) of the shop's permanent decor. He presented
it with as ardent a speech as might have been delivered to a
dying spouse in a Victorian novel. His words apparently implied
that her situation was terminal; Lissy made clear that she was
doing quite well, thank you, and expected to be around for a
while.

Lissy had a great sense of humor and a nice touch of
American slang, which showed up charmingly, mingled with an Old
World style that was more literary than epistolary, in her
letters to Ruth. Those letters nearly always ended with "So
long, Ruth." Lissy and Ruth had occasional phone calls, and I
would always hear my wife's laughter at the jests that came
over the wire.

In Palo Alto the Voegelins put together a home of great
elegance in both furnishings and ornament. I remember
especially a large Kokoschka and a Japanese screen, which I
believe Eric brought back from a trip to Asia (he had become
interested in Eastern philosophies, and had made some progress
in learning Chinese). There were no photographs in evidence;
they did not go for the American practice of devoting wall
space to a photographic family history. They lacked family, in
the usual sense, and this was a source of some sadness.
Relations with Lissy's family in Vienna were difficult, and may
indeed have ended because her relatives were businesspeople who
had welcomed the Nazi regime. Perhaps there were no survivors
in Eric's immediate family. At one time, however, the Voegelins
had welcome contact with--visited and were visited by--a niece
of Eric's for whom they felt considerable affection. My notion
is that the geographical separation prevented the development
of an enduring relationship. The Voegelins spoke once or twice
about having or adopting children, but it may be that by the
time they were financially secure, age had become a bar to
parenthood. They had a pair of dogs, of which they were, or at
least Lissy was, very fond; these beasts seemed not to welcome
our visits and adopted a frighteningly yapping and snarling
style, in which they were reminiscent of the dreadful Caesar,
who regularly alarmed guests at the Brooks home in Baton Rouge
back in the forties. The Voegelins had cars, handsome ones; and
as I've said, Lissy did all the driving. Eric had driven when
they first had a car, I was told, but a mishap when he was at
the wheel had led to Lissy's permanent assumption of the
chauffeur's duties. This was not one of those cases I have
known in which an intellectual's professed inability to drive
seemed less an admission of incompetence than a claim to
talents that rendered him superior to such mechanical
activities. (Obviously I write as one who likes to drive.)

When Ruth and I visited our son and his family, we regularly
called on the Voegelins, sometimes to share a meal and
sometimes just to talk. The last time the four of us were
together was in December 1984. Eric, who had been in failing
health, was bedridden. We talked with him as he lay, in pajamas
and a bathrobe, on a daybed in a smaller room (not primarily a
bedroom, I think) down the hall from the main living room. I
remember that his white hair was unusually long. He took
pleasure in biblical readings--the books were mentioned, but I
can't recall them--these often done by an attendant. One event
during this visit stands out in my memory. Eric said, in a
peaceful and unemotional way, without a hint of this-is-it
heroism: "It is time to die." Lissy responded sharply, almost
angrily: "But you do not think of me. What am I going to do?"
We had never heard her use that tone with Eric, though she was
always as independent as she was devoted.

Eric died about ten days later. He died on the same day as
Charles Hyneman, formerly a political scientist at LSU, whom I
am glad also to claim as a longtime friend. Charles was a
sedulous student of practical American politics and thus
presented a contrast to Eric, the theorist and philosophical
historian. The American Spectator, founded by former students
of Hyneman's at Indiana, remarked that the deaths of Voegelin
and Hyneman had "lowered the intelligence level of the
nation."

During visits to the Voegelins in Palo Alto we might, as I
have said, dine together, or we might chat. Occasionally Eric
would say, making a rare dip into colloquialism, "Bob and I
must have some boy-talk." Off we would go to a restaurant, and
by way of boy-talk Eric would hold forth on whatever topics he
was currently exploring in his reading and writing. I have
already mentioned Lissy's comment that Eric "had no small
talk." I had plenty of it, but it seemed too small for the
occasion. So I tended to be listener only, mortified by my
incapacity to deal with the subjects on which Eric spoke easily
and eloquently, and mortified too by the flattering implication
that I was an equal partner in the conversation. I fell into
the category that Peter Shaffer, in his 1968 play The
White Liars, called "Takers" (as opposed to "Givers"). I
have long remembered an aphorism of Eric's at one of these
occasions: "Of course there is no God. But we must believe in
Him." I understood, I thought, the concept of the indispensable
symbol.

The disparity between the Giver and the Taker roles led, as
it seemed to me it must, to a thinning of our relationship. My
original duties as native informant virtually disappeared as
Eric came to know more and more about America. He had read
widely in literature in English, and he was a more than capable
critic of what he read. Listening, however enthusiastic, was
not enough. I knew Eric felt pressed by the vastness of the
intellectual tasks in which he was engaged, and by the sense of
a rapidly diminishing time in which to carry them out. I came
to feel that I could be most helpful by not taking up time he
could use more profitably in his study. We gradually reduced
the number of our visits to the Voegelins, but there was never
any diminution of their wonderful cordiality.

After Eric's death the matter came up in a conversation
between Lissy and me. Perhaps I brought it up, wanting to
explain myself, no doubt hoping to have been seen as
considerate and helpful rather than indifferent or unfriendly.
Lissy's comment went something like this: "Yes, Eric noticed
that you weren't coming over as much. He wondered why. He was
very sad about it. He was very fond of you." I wondered
whether, as often happens with good intentions, I had blown
it.

Michael Franz [asked a question about what made Voegelin
laugh.]. Yet, I don't know how to respond to it in a
straightforward way. Unlike Michael and most of Eric's students
in Munich, he had no relation to wine or any other type of
alcohol. He was drunk after one glass of wine, mostly bad wine.
We thought that was funny. (He didn't enforce any kind of
teetotaling regime and was actually very pleased when people
enjoyed themselves with lots of wine at his parties, as his
students did.) He despised people who could distinguish between
good and bad wines. He considered them bourgeois and unserious.
He poked fun at Winckelmann from the Max Weber Institute
because he knew how to read wines. Voegelin was an illiterate
in that regard. He was not very sophisticated when it came to
opera, theatre productions, symphonic music, and movies either.
Lissy made sometimes the mistake of taking Eric to the opera in
Munich. He fell regularly asleep. She had always to poke him in
the side when he started to snore.

One could sometimes provoke him to go and see a particular
movie. He loved, for example, some of the early Beatles movies.
Whether he accepted their music, I'm not sure. He certainly
liked to use his familiarity with their movies to needle
sometimes some of his stuffy colleagues. I experienced that at
a dinner party in Cambridge, Mass. in March 1967, when he
compared the Beatles with Gregorian music. At that time, he had
not the slightest idea what he was talking about. But he
enjoyed tremendously the baffled looks of the other dinner
guests. He was amused.

Did Voegelin have a sense of humor? He liked jokes and
gossip but was unable to remember most of it. Basically, he was
not interested. If someone would ask me to characterize
Voegelin in the social sphere, I would say that he was an
intellectual elitist with proletarian tastes and sensitivities.
He would always go to cheap restaurants and smoke even cheaper
cigars. Coming from a long line of peasants myself, I know what
I'm talking about. I didn't like the restaurants he picked.

Voegelin's humor was of a different kind. He had been
brought up in Vienna on a weekly dosage of Karl Kraus'
Die Fackel (The Torch). Anyone who wants to get a
feel for what that education meant for intellectually sensitive
people in Vienna should read Elias Canetti's The
Torch. Canetti's remembrances of Kraus are Voegelin's.
The Kraus humor was not the Saturday Night type of humor. It
was biting, sarcastic, destructive. It was directed against the
political, economic and cultural establishment of Austria and
Germany during WWI and, then, the post-war republics, and,
finally, Nazi Germany. Kraus's attacks on the Austrian and
German emperors and their inane utterances are priceless and
should be read now, at the time of George W. Bush's presidency.
Kraus would have elevated George W. to emperor status, and
Voegelin would have laughed. Eric thought Eisenhower was
hilarious as president because of his peculiar oral speech
behavior.

Voegelin's Krausian sense of humor permeates his 1964
lectures on Hitler and the Germans. One has to read those
lectures, in order to get a glimpse at Voegelin's ability to
combine analysis and laughter. He uses laughter to destroy the
fellow travelers of megalomaniacal power.

Before you go out and trash Peggy Guggenheim and abstract art,
including Pollock, in the name of Voegelin, I would like to
warn you. Voegelin loved abstract art and bought a painting by
Bacci (which Paul Caringella inherited) from Peggy Guggenheim
in Venice. It was hanging in the Voegelin flat in Munich and
later in Palo Alto. The Voegelins loved it when Americans
dropped in and asked them whether they had painted it
themselves. The most famous American to ask that question was
Eleanore Dulles, the sister of the famous brothers and the aunt
of the cardinal. There were also some Germans who wanted to ask
that question, however, they lacked the American audacity to
make fools of themselves.

* * *

I read the Heilman memoir in its German version when it was
published in Sinn und Form last year and was surprised about
the Kokoschka reference. I have never seen a Kokoschka hanging
in Voegelins' Munich or Palo Alto house. Paul would have become
a very rich man, indeed, if the Bacci would have been certified
as a Kokoschka. My explanation for the Heilman reference is
simple, Heilman must not have shared Eric Voegelin's aesthetic
taste or wasn't wearing his glasses when he looked at the
canvas. But then, I myself may have needed glasses decades
ago!

By the way, I don't know whether Hans Sedlmayr ever
commented on the Bacci in Munich. Maybe he suspected that
Voegelin had finally lost the "Mitte", after all that was the
title of Sedlmayr's famous attack on modern art, Der
Verlust der Mitte (the loss of the center). Unlike
Voegelin Sedlmayr stayed in Vienna and taught from 1936 to 1945
at the University of Vienna. In 1945 he was suspended by the
Allies from his job and shared Heidegger's fate until 51 when
he was hired by the University of Munich. Voegelin admired
Sedlmayr's erudition in European art history, and Sedlmayr
frequently quoted Voegelin as philosophical authority in his
attack on modern art (see, for example, Sedlmayr's book Der
Tod des Lichtes, 1964). Like most of Voegelin's colleagues
at the University of Munich, Sedlmayr was not amused by
Voegelin's lectures in 1964 on "Hitler and the Germans".
Voegelin couldn't care less and was delighted on his part about
their reactions.

* * *

Yes, the Voegelins had a Christo "bundle". They didn't buy
it. It was given to Eric as a farewell present by Murri Selle
and Klaus-Hartmut Olbricht, young, non-student admirers of
Voegelin's in Munich who belonged to the wide social circle
around the Institut. They were professionally connected with
the art milieux in Germany and Italy. They toured the
exhibitions and wrote about them in newspapers, magazines and
journals. Eric loved their oral reports about their trips. The
fact that he didn't throw away the flower bundle indicates
recognition. Paul got it authenticated as a Christo object.

Voegelin didn't like Willy Brandt. I think he took it
personally that Brandt, when he was mayor of West Berlin, fell
asleep during a talk he gave. Lissy alleged that Brandt was
drunk. Be that as it may, when Brandt became chancellor of West
Germany in the fall of 1969 the whole Republican establishment
at Hoover was in uproar. They didn't like Brandt and his
Ost-Politik. I had just arrived in Stanford in September and
was elated about the election and Brandt becoming chancellor.
For me it was important that a political refugee from Nazi
Germany would finally make German politics become existentially
"legitimate" again. You may call that romantic or whatever, but
we young Germans had had enough of all those compromised
figures from the past that were littering our political
landscape. Voegelin knew that about the attitude of his Munich
students, and he agreed with us. That was the important bond
that existed between us and the re-emigrant who came back from
America to introduce us to a world of learning we had no
knowledge of. Voegelin was, in that sense, a romantic also. He
never stopped me from attacking Stefan Possony in Stanford in
long debates over German foreign policy. He would have never
admitted that but, in a way, he liked that conspiratorial
relationship that he had established with his students against
the Germans who were in denial.

Now, that bond did not stop us from disagreeing with him on
many issues. Many of us didn't like Voegelin's cold war
rhetoric that shines through so clearly in his
Autobiographical Reflections. We were in support
of the slow process of undermining the legitimacy of the East
German regime from within. We supported a slightly different
policy of pulling the rug out from under the regime.

During the late 1960s, Professor Voegelin indulged in a
wonderfully entertaining digression in his class at Notre Dame
about conspiracy theorists and people who believed in flying
saucers. It was masterful. I can't do it justice, but what I
carried away from it was this: some people are so alienated
from the demanding, unremarkable, grueling routine of daily
life, and from the reality of the existential tension in which
they live, that they want some outside truth (the conspiracy
theorist's discovery; It's the Rockefellers!) or outside,
higher power (walking off a spaceship on the White House lawn)
to resolve the painful tension of mysterious unknowing and
abiding silent suffering.

I came to the LSU campus in the Fall of 1948 to follow an
undergraduate education at a small denominational college
(major in history) with graduate work in history at our State
University. Married housing was not available immediately so I
was assigned a room in a crowded dormitory with two
undergraduate students. One of them was pouring over books that
included the Gospel of John for a class with somebody by the
name of Eric Voegelin in the Government Department. This
puzzled me immensely. I had been raised in one of the many
rural churches of the Southern Baptist Convention but my
selection of it's undergraduate college for GI Bill education
was based strictly on circumstances, not on religion. I had
taken the two required courses in Bible, no more. I remember
being mildly surprised at first that a professor at a State
University considered one of the Gospels to be among the
documents for serious study.

Consequently, when the time came for me to choose my courses
and emphases, I decided that a minor in Government would be a
logical choice for a history major and thus, soon found myself
in classes and a seminar with Voegelin.

I cannot, now, place my experiences with him in any strict
chronological order. One of them that stands out was my
discovery of his humility and intellectual honesty when
challenged on a point of historical fact. He made it clear that
for the most part, students should obtain the annals of history
from available references and not expect that he would bother
with this in class.

Well, came the time when he was lecturing on the issue of
the Unam Sanctum by Boniface VIII. As he drew out
the background for the issue, he gave reasons and circumstances
that did not include the importance of the Jubilee year in
1300. I raised my hand and as politely as possible informed him
that I had been taught by a medieval scholar in our history
department that the impressive visitation of Rome by Pilgrims
in the Jubilee year was significant in heartening the old Pope
to believe he had more support in Christendom than he had
surmised, and that consequently he had issued a bull scolding
Philip in 1301 followed by the Unam Sanctum in
1302.

I was afraid of a scolding but instead, he assumed a quite
businesslike attitude and assured the class that perhaps he
needed to check this point.

This gave me no feeling of having won a point. I knew quite
well, even by then, that he had read that Papal Bull in the
Latin and knew more about it than I did. What I took from his
response was a display of intellectual honesty that drew me
even more energetically to consider his interpretation of
history. He still had a quite pronounced accent so I strained
to hear every word and tried to transcribe as closely as I
could. I still have some of those class notes.

Once he suggested in class that we read Nicolas Berdiaev's
The Meaning of History. I read it eagerly during
the following weekend and on Monday morning stopped by his
office to so inform him and to share with him my enjoyment of
its wisdom. Instead of the little pat on the head (figuratively
speaking) I expected, he shifted his cigar to the other side of
his mouth, fixed me with one of his resigned stares and
responded, "I never ceased to be amazed at zeze students who
tell me zay have read a book like Berdiaev over zee weekend!!!
I have read zat book four times and STILL do not fully
understand it!"

What a beguiling lesson in humility!! Fifty+ years later at
the age of 80 I remember that little chastisement with great
fondness and love. I'm also still trying to understand Bergson
"more fully."

I recall, also, that on one occasion I complained to him how
miserably equipped I was in language study to EVER master
materials that he knew so well. I think he sensed that I was
begging him to show me some shortcut to reaching his level of
knowledge and characteristically, he pointedly refused to
sugarcoat. He nodded that he understood the problem but that
there was simply no easy solution. When, today, I read his sage
comments about the "pitiful" products of the educational system
that turns poorly trained people over to the scholars for
"finishing" I know what he means. I really think that at
bottom, this was the driving force in his work. He really DID
blame the pitiful, woefully lacking, intellectual climate
responsible for acceptance by societies that had proud cultural
histories of murderous, ideological gangs whose vulgarity he
could never find adequate words to describe.

But, without the Hitler gang, Pearl Harbor, etc., would the
path of this rural country bumpkin ever have crossed this great
star on the educational horizon? As long as I have breath in my
body, I shall continue to "sit at his feet."

One of my classes with Voegelin was a seminar which met at his
home on a weekly basis. For each session, a student had been
assigned a book on which to report during that session. This
would form the basis for that evening's work. I was assigned
Bergson's Two Sources of Morality and Religion. I
went to Voegelin's office after I had read the book to see if I
had understood what it was saying. After summarizing the
conclusions I had drawn as to what Bergson was saying, I
stopped and waited for his response. I was a bit startled when
he replied, "You have understood Bergson." That was all. But, I
discovered that I was not home free. When my night came to
report on the book to the group, I delivered myself of a little
summary of Bergson's life and work drawn from the Encyclopaedia
Britannica. Voegelin's eyes revealed his dissatisfaction when
he reproved me. "Where did you get this stuff?" he asked me. It
was immediately evident that it might well have been better if
I had just elected not to fit Bergson into the philosophical
world via the Britannica even if I DID own a set I had
purchased for $5.00 a month back in 1947.

He was even rougher on the only woman student in the class
who was a colleague among our graduate students in history. She
was assigned to read a title by Collingwood, the exact title of
which I do not remember but it had to do with meaning in
history.

As she began reporting on this book, Voegelin grew
demonstrably more and more impatient. Finally, he could contain
himself no longer and virtually exploded as he inquired, "Young
lady have you READ ziz book?" She replied in the affirmative
but he pressed further. "All of it?" Then, she admitted that
there was one part at the end she had NOT read. It was titled,
"Epilogomena" she said and continued, "Quite frankly, I didn't
know what this word meant so looked it up in the dictionary and
found the meaning as "afterthoughts" so I determined from this
that it was not important." This almost brought Voegelin out of
his chair. "My dear young lady," he burst out, "you do not look
up important words such as this in ze tool of a publisher's
trade. Scholars make ze dictionary, not ze other way
around!"

I am telling this story exactly as I recall it. The young
woman involved worked part time at the University Press and
I've often wondered if he did not KNOW that. It could have been
that in part, he was reflecting experiences he had had in
dealing with editors who wished to change his vocabulary here
and there. I have also wondered since that time if Lissy, his
wife may have scolded him privately for treating the young
woman so harshly. I read in one of his letters to his friend
Shuetz that "Lissy said I could not possibly repay such a
lovely dinner in Paris by writing a bad review" of some article
Shuetz had written. Interpreting most such situations turn out
to be a mixed bag. All of us learned a lesson from the
incident. What he did was simply in his nature and yet, this
was by far the most vigorous tongue-lashing I ever saw him
deliver. I'll bet (grin) no one of us EVER left an
"Epilogomena" unread after that.

During the semester in which I was taking my first course with
Voegelin, the wife and I, who were both raised as Southern
Baptists, decided one Sunday morning to attend the little
Baptist church just off campus that was intended to serve
students primarily. It happened that I had merely a speaking
acquaintance with the local Baptist leader who was overseeing
the little church but on this particular Sunday, a young
preacher was scheduled to deliver the sermon.

In introducing him, the older man, told the congregation
quite openly and frankly that the young man had discussed the
subject of his "message" with him beforehand and that he, as a
mature adviser, had strongly advised him not to pursue that
subject. He said, however, that the young preacher felt "an
overwhelming call of the spirit" to "deliver this message" at
this particular time and so he, the older man, agreed that he
should follow the "inclination of the spirit" [I am
paraphrasing these quotes but they give the gist of what was
said].

He was not far into his sermon when I began to wonder if he
were not the kind of young preacher we had often joked about at
the denominational college where I had gotten my B.A., i.e.,
one who saw the initials GPC written in the sky and decided the
initials stood for "Go Preach Christ" while it was more obvious
that the real message had been, "Go Plow Corn!!"

Of course, I was only beginning my contact with Voegelin but
I already suspected that this fellow was WAY over his head and
even worse, had not the education to recognize it. He should,
indeed, have listened to and abided by the council of his
senior advisor.

He lit into Voegelin with the inflamed rhetoric of a fiery
evangelist taking Voegelin to task for teaching college
students that the image of Christ changed according to the
culture in the epochs succeeding the revelation, wanting the
students to hold fast to the dogma that Jesus was "the same
yesterday, today and forever," etc.

The next time I saw Voegelin in the hall, I asked him if he
knew that he was the subject of a sermon in that little church
the previous Sunday. He listened and then smiled, saying that
no, he had not heard about it but was glad that SOMEBODY was
paying attention to his work. I had the impression that this
was probably not the first time he had heard of the "yokel"
response to his scholarship.

My pilgrimage was already out of the clerical establishment
and this episode revealed to me that Voegelin's teaching
offered more of an adventure in a search for the truth of
existence (a phrase I didn't even know at that time) than any
church attendance could yield. Even to this day, out of respect
and deference to my wife who is not intellectually inclined but
who has been my faithful companion for 58 years yesterday, and,
at the time was working as a secretary for the History
Department in order for me to pursue my studies, I have never
formally removed myself from church membership.

But, this incident stayed with me and became a sort of
beginning of my recognition that the clerical establishment was
not for me. Indeed, long afterward, in the 1960s after we came
to New Orleans, we DID discover and join a Baptist Church which
was much more intellectual and liberal in its views and I even
became a deacon for a few years. After the death of a beloved
teen-age daughter, my grief was so deep that it created another
re-appraisal of my relationship to a clerical establishment. It
has been only in the past two years that I have concluded that
Voegelin was probably a Christian only in the non-dogmatic
sense as described by Niemyer in an article about Voegelin's
spiritual position that Notre Dame was kind enough to send
me.

That young man's rashness and dogmatic ignorance on that
Sunday morning has continued to sum up for me the assault on
the openness (a la Bergson) that was the hallmark of Eric
Voegelin to the very end. That young man could have learned to
appreciate Christianity so much more deeply if he had been able
to break out and simply hear what Voegelin was REALLY teaching.
It reminds me still today of the awesome power of dogmatism and
closure of the soul against the spirit - a direction which
Voegelin warned could lead to nothing but perdition while the
"spirit moves on" in history.

In our Physics Department at the University of New Orleans,
there was a genius who had been a graduate assistant of
Einstein in his younger years and had done important work in
the field of optics. His name was Max Herschberger. I came to
know him because in my position on the University Religious
Council, I was a member of two or three seminars on Old
Testament writing given by our Jewish rabbi and Max
Herschberger loved to whet his deep interest in philosophy by
attending these discussions. He was a rather chubby little man
who the women often referred to as a little "teddy bear." I
watched him take on around 30 opponents in chess at one time
and beat most of them.

As Chairman of the Scholar-in-Residence committee of the
Council, I was able to secure Voegelin's agreement to visit the
campus (I believe it was the early seventies) for a week's
series of lectures to designated classes and some open lectures
as well. I had purchased and read, at that time, the first two
volumes of Order and History which, of course, I
asked him to autograph.

Max Herschberger appeared rather late for the first night's
open lecture and took a chair in the back. Voegelin, in the
course of his talk referred to Einstein and remarked that the
latter had said some pretty silly things when speaking out of
his field. Herschberger, made a beeline for me at the end of
the talk and implored me to schedule some time in which he
could confer with Voegelin. I could think of no place in the
rather tight schedule except breakfast the next morning in the
cafeteria of the student union building where we had Voegelin
housed. Voegelin readily agreed and so the next morning, these
two dear old German professors talked vigorously and, I guess,
to their heart's content. I'm sure that Max took him to task
about Einstein but I was busy with the schedule for the day and
was not able to sit in on the conversation. Herschberger later
thanked me profusely for arranging the meeting.

I only recall one of the open lectures in which Voegelin
made a reference with which I was familiar from Israel
and Revelation and I was proud to show off my knowledge
by querying, "Song of the Harper?" to which he nodded his head
and repeated it. Oddly enough, I do not recall the "Debate of a
man contemplating suicide with his soul" being mentioned but I
think it must have been as he references that piece frequently
in his articles as evidence of a situation in ancient Egypt he
considered to be similar to our own modernity.

I don't recall what honorarium we paid him but most of our
honorariums were relatively modest. He remarked to me during
the course of the week that his health was very good and he
looked forward to continuing his work for a long time. I don't
think he had as yet held the interviews with Eugene Webb that
formed the basis of Webb's splendid intellectual biography of
his work.

Voegelin did not bring his wife with him but you know by now
that I consider Lissy as the kind of life's companion to him
that Mrs. Hershberger had to Max who, during his final years on
campus was almost never seen out of her company. Four beautiful
people who enriched my life. I was only exposed to Lissy's warm
hostessing on the one occasion of that series of seminars at
his house somewhere around 1950.

During the course of Voegelin's visit to our UNO campus, I
recall stepping into the room during the last few minutes of a
talk he was giving to a group of political science scholars. I
recall only hearing him say to them at the end of what must
have been something of a heated exchange something like, "If
you neglect the spiritual aspect of man's existence, you have
mutilated ze science, that is all I am saying!" My memory
cannot vouch for the accuracy of the first nine words of that
sentence but I distinctly remember the rest of the sentence as
it was said with some gusto.

During the week he was with us, I arranged a little party at
our home so that friends among the faculty and administration
could have an opportunity to socialize with him. My two little
daughters went on to bed but as the party was beginning to get
underway, the youngest could not resist running into the room
in her pajamas and bare feet to greet the guest. She was
usually highly active, jumping around on the sofa and becoming
the center of attention. Before we persuaded her to return to
bed, Voegelin drew me aside and with a most concerned look, ask
me the following question: "Shouldn't ze child have shoes on?"
He was concerned for her health. The "child" is now thirty-six
years of age!!

I told her not long ago that I would love to have the three
paragraphs at the close of "End of Worldly Existence" in his
Israel and Revelation read at my funeral. I asked
Voegelin during his stay here how he could write such beautiful
poetic prose as illustrated by those three paragraphs. He reply
was, "Well, I had Homer as my model."

I realize how very fortunate I was looking back over my life
to have had, in reality, three fathers - my biological father
who raised us well, an uncle who ushered me into the world of
earning a living and finally, Eric Voegelin who became the
center of my intellectual and philosophical life. That, my
friends, is "grace!!" I'm sure he has worthier "children"
galore but not one who is more thankful than I.

Soon after I had taken one of Voegelin's courses which dealt,
generally, with the subject matter of the period covered in
Cohn's The Pursuit of the Millennium, I was
engaged in a seminar with our history professor who taught
modern Europe, one of my chosen five fields. I was his ONLY
student in this course and we met in his office weekly so I
came to know him very well. So well, in fact, that when, for
some reason, Voegelin had to be off campus, and this professor,
though not affiliated with the Government Department, was asked
to teach Voegelin's course in the latter's absence. This young
professor had noted that I took notes rather zealously and he
had evidently discovered in conversation that I had taken this
particular course with Voegelin only recently. He asked if he
might borrow my notes from the course so that he could get a
better idea of what material Voegelin covered and how he
treated it. I have some notes from Voegelin's class still in my
file cabinet and they may be the very notes I lent to this
professor. At any rate, I readily agreed and after two or three
weeks he kept his promise to return them to me.

In returning the notes, he unburdened himself somewhat
unfavorably as to his reaction to their content. I know now, of
course, that his acceptance of "modernity" was the very
opposite of Voegelin's attitude toward it. He saw the
"enlightenment" in quite different light than that expressed in
Voegelin's assessment of Marx and Comte (I don't think
Voegelin's critique of Hegel had made much of an impression on
me then. "Where in the world, he asked me, does he get such
stuff as this??"

At the time, I considered this difference more or less along
the lines of the current view of Voegelin among both faculty
and graduate students at the time. He was notorious for having
enormous numbers of books checked out of the library (faculty
had unlimited privileges, not accorded graduate students),
something mentioned by one of his colleagues, a man named
Simpson who was a faculty colleague in the English Department
in an article in the Southern Review on Voegelin's position as
an educator and intellectual. Voegelin was also seen frequently
walking among the hedges and flowers behind the Law Building
where the Government Department was housed, lost in meditation.
Let me hasten to add that this was something "I" never
personally observed but others must have. I'm not sure that any
but a few of them who were very close to him could have known
that he would one day, after a relatively short tenure at LSU
be awarded the rare title of "Boyd Professor" in recognition of
his talent and usefulness to the University as a senior faculty
member.

Aspects of these observations are sometimes tangential to
personal memories of Voegelin but may clarify a point or two.
I've sometimes been asked to verify the story about how many
cigars Voegelin consumed daily, something I'm unable to do and
I take Ellis Sandoz' word for it.

But, I don't believe that Voegelin was alone in possessing
certain interesting personal habits or traits at LSU. Graduate
students are notable for finding these quickly among the
faculty members of their acquaintance, especially those who
have the power to retard or advance graduate careers. I could
tell interesting stories about T. Harry Williams and others who
happened to be "big guns" at LSU during my five years
there.

For example, Robert J. Harris was head of the "Government"
department at LSU and it was Harris who brought Voegelin there
from the University of Alabama according to the
Autobiographical Reflections. I remember just as
vividly as I do the seminar at Voegelin's home, a seminar with
Dr. Harris. On the first day, as we were seated around a
rectangular table, he sat at the head of the table with his
chair turned away from the table so that he had to turn his
head backward in a peculiar sort of way in order to face and
talk to us. His first act was to begin reading a book listing
the organizations that existed in the United States at the time
alphabetically. He pointed out that there were six Abraham
Lincoln societies. His point was the American proclivity for
solving problems through organizing clubs.

Voegelin speaks warmly in the "Reflections" about Harris and
his friendship and about learning from him "a good number of
things" including the construction of Supreme Court
decisions.

I may have spoken earlier of the gossip among the graduate
students about how many library books Voegelin had checked out.
In his long article on Voegelin in the book, Eric
Voegelin's Significance for the Modern Mind, Lewis
Simpson remarks that an inquiry about a certain book brought
the information that it was checked out to Voegelin on a
"long-overdue charge." The "long-overdue" characterization
surprises me because I understood at the time that the faculty
members were given no time limit on returning books as we were.
At any rate, Simpson says that he asked that the book be
recalled and it was returned "promptly."

I think that I have not previously recounted one rather
amusing incident involving a colleague among the graduate
students in history. Charley Roland, who later taught at Tulane
University and the University of Kentucky, had written his
doctoral dissertation on the sugar plantations in Louisiana,
that stretch from where I now live up the Mississippi River to
Baton Rouge. I do not recall now whether Voegelin was his
assigned minor professor or acting in that capacity for
somebody else but I do recall Charley telling the story of the
encounter. He said that Voegelin, in returning it to him
informed him that Mrs. Voegelin had read it with interest but
wondered what one could find in the story that could not be
found in Frank Yerby's Foxes of Harrow. I sensed
no feeling of resentment, only of amusement on Charley's part.
I remember that he expressed great admiration for Voegelin's
amazing knowledge of the origin of ideas and symbols. Charley
was already an accomplished lecturer before he left grad
school. I have no memory of any extensive association with
others among Voegelin's students.

I would like to mention something here that perhaps someone
can help supply. In one of his courses, Voegelin put on the
blackboard a mathematical formula which he cited as evidence
that there is no such thing as Progress "with a big P," only
progress with a small "p." If I jotted that formula down, it
became misplaced. If anybody remembers it I'd be very much
obliged if it could be posted. I do not believe I've seen it at
any of the Voegelin sites on the net.

During the time that I was taking a course with Voegelin, I
became aware of Velikovsky's newly published two volume work,
Worlds in Collision. I recall my surprise that he
attributed the "reddish dust" on the "Red Sea" to the entrance
of Venus (I hope I'm recalling this correctly) as a younger
body into the earth's orbit, causing not only this dust but the
"sun to stand still" for Joshua. My surprise was caused by my
understanding that it had already been discovered that the
rendition of "Red Sea" was incorrect and that the body of water
being referred to was the "Reed Sea." I had not been assigned
this work but was merely reading it for interest. I decided to
inquire of Dr. Voegelin what he thought of the book. His
response was both immediate and emphatic; "Trash," was his
immediate verdict and it was uttered in such a manner as, it
seemed to me, to invite no further discussion. I've read in
subsequent years about the "Velikovsky problem" and so have
been reminded of that brief exchange many times. As I
understand the "problem" it has to do with the discomfiture of
some of the astronomers in finding Venus to be hotter than they
had once believed it to be thus conferring upon Velikovsky some
degree of respectability. I'm, admittedly, no judge at all in
this "controversy" and so have to continue to assume that Dr.
Voegelin was leading me in the right direction.

Let me say in this connection that if Voegelin offered any
courses in which biblical material such as the Mosaic
revelation, Pauline visions or the Gospel of John were offered,
I was not privileged to take them. When I later purchased and
read the first volume of Order and History it was
my introduction to his vast knowledge and theorization in this
particular area.

I have mentioned before that I ended my residency at LSU in
1953 and conducted an LSU residence program on the Canal Zone
for three years prior to completing my doctorate in 1957. I
began my teaching career at a small denominational college in
the State and during that time, a former colleague in another
social science field invited me to read a paper on the subject
of my dissertation at a conference being held at his
institution. Israel and Revelation had been
published by that time and a severe critic of Voegelin's work
read a paper at the same conference. I was unprepared to judge
the criticism for reasons given above but felt a strong
personal resentment about the criticism. I "pondered these
things in my heart" so to speak and read with increasing
interest the other volumes as they became available. The fourth
volume reinforced my personal memory of Voegelin's intellectual
honesty and integrity.

Let me say that I have a friend and colleague of my own age
in the field of history, both of us retired from the same
institution, who would have no interest in Eric Voegelin
whatsoever and not long ago I spoke to a former colleague in
the political science department who informed me that as far as
he knew nobody in the department had any particular interest in
Voegelin.

On the other hand, I recently found a group in the political
science department at Radford University in Virginia, one of
them being Nick Pappas, with a strong interest in Voegelin's
work. I'm going to attempt to interest them in the forum as I
know they would have some interesting contributions to
make.

I remember being, perhaps, TOO bold in blurting out the
question to Voegelin when he was on our campus in 1971 as to
whether or not he was affiliated with a church. Heilman is
right that Voegelin was seldom angry or impolite with anybody.
Voegelin mumbled something about "Lutheran" which led me to
assume that he had been, perhaps, baptized as a child in that
church but had not been an active church member. This was
clarified for me somewhat in Heilman's book. On page 100, he
says that "Once Lissy got the notion that one had to be a
church member to undergo funeral rites; [this was after he had
left the Hoover Institute] Eric [Heilman called him by his
first name] said matter-of-factly, 'All right, we will join a
church then.' "

I think quite often of another man who became influential in
my life. I met Dr. Peter Bertocci of Boston University (a
Personalist philosopher) in 1958 and was associated with him on
two other occasions, one of them being another of my
contributions to our invited scholars as was Voegelin. Bertocci
was a confessed Methodist Christian, one of his books being,
Religion as Creative Insecurity. But I think along
the line of Voegelin, of Bertocci's little booklet, "Education
and the Vision of Excellence," a lecture he gave at Boston
University in 1960. In it, he makes a plea to educate the
person to the full extent of his ability at whatever stage of
intellectual level that person might be in life. He insists [a
favorite word of his] that there is no reason that the person
destined to be a day worker all of his life should be deprived
of as much of the knowledge of Plato as that person's
individual capabilities might allow and not to shove him aside
simply because she/he/it could not become a college graduate or
even a high school graduate.

I know that Voegelin complained frequently of the students
presented to him for further education after they had been
"ruined" by poor or neglected training and I do not think that
if they had ever had the occasion to talk with each other that
Voegelin would have disagreed. Why would I say that. Well, in
the main, because while others of Voegelin's graduate students
were more oriented than I at the time to the concept of
transcendence, I NEVER felt that he considered me and others
like me to be dunces who were not worth the time of an
obviously hard-working, dedicated scholar with years of
experience. I think also of Charles Hampden-Turner, another of
our Scholars-in-Residence whose writings have steadily
emphasized the unifying elements inherent even in capitalism
(The Seven Pillars of Capitalism, Maps of
the Mind, Radical Man, etc.)

What if such men as Eric Voegelin, Peter Bertocci, Charles
Hampden-Turner and perhaps others that evforum members might
name, could have served on a blue-ribbon committee to set up
the curriculum and aims, say of a junior college. Voegelin
first taught me about Plato's provision in the
constitution-building of the Laws for a "Nocturnal
Council" While I was taking Voegelin's courses, I was majoring
in Latin American history (colonial and modern) so I know that
Simon Bolivar actually drew up the first constitution for
Bolivia as virtually a copy of Plato's model, if (grin) one can
imagine such an anomaly. But a child of the enlightenment such
as Bolivar could easily believe in the workability of raw Plato
(grin) in that environment. Bolivar went through his own
learning process, however and when he left Cartagena for the
last time he pronounced that "he who makes a revolution, plows
the sea."

Heilman's information that Voegelin played the stock market
in his declining years, learned to do so quickly and did quite
well (according to Lissy) was quite an eye-opener for me!! The
rumor among the his graduate students was that he and Lissy
were not at all happy shopping in supermarkets but preferred
the small shops where fresh produce (farm-to-market) was much
preferred. Heilman, however, does not mention that so I wonder
about it. I'll just stow it away until some intimate (Paul
Caringella?) produces a full scale biography of "Bob and
Ruth's" "Eric and Lissy." I'll be the first in line if I'm
permitted to live until that day.

From man and scholar, Eric Voegelin has become a kind of
monument, and a cult has sprung up around him as, also in their
lifetimes, around Hegel and Heidegger. Yet it is a different
cult; the former two never left their homeland, were
beneficiaries of its honors, and participated in its public,
even its political, life. Both were echt Deutsche,
intrinsically German, in attitude, style, philosophical form
and language. Their contemporaries were their posterity: the
echoes and the resonances were in before they died, although
perhaps more in Heidegger's case than in Hegel's who died young
for a philosopher. But both spawned, in equal measure,
imitators, admirers, epigones exaggerating their jargon; their
ideas and influence extended far and wide. Hegel begot the
"Hegelian" right and the "Hegelian" left, and also Marx,
Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, each of them, in his turn,
fountainheads of modernity. Heidegger is the father of
contemporary existentialism (Sartre's is a poor copy) and of
the rebellious process-theologians, whether in the classroom at
Tübingen or in the South American jungle.

Voegelin has nothing to do with such glories and --
embarrassments. He is not a public man; but an expatriate; he
is not interviewed in Der Spiegel, is not
"controversial" politically; his fate at the hands of posterity
cannot be easily guessed: do his followers really understand
him well enough or, as Professor Albright suspected it in his
comprehensive review of Order and History, will
they disregard his "theistic emphasis" and elaborate a
"Hegelian historicism" of their own? (Of this, later).

The most important difference with Hegel and Heidegger is
that Voegelin's real public is in America and generally in the
Anglophone world where he is placed on a pedestal by a
restricted circle of cognoscenti. In his native Germany --
nemo propheta in patria sua -- he has fervent
partisans, but also antagonistic and irony-filled critics. They
represent a quasi-posterity insofar as the "new science of
politics" has not succeeded in liquidating the old: Voegelin's
German critics belong to socialist, positivist or neo-rightist
schools who reject political science with the large doses of
philosophy, religion and mythology that Voegelin has
introduced. They also reject what they regard as the irrational
(in fact, non-positivistic) element in his opus, partly because
they see German political scholarship safer when patronized by
the American academic fashion (behaviorism, neopositivism,
statistical methods, etc.), that is, by the study of
Gesellschaft, than led back to the exploration of the
Gemeinschaft with its historical consciousness and
symbols.

In this sense, Voegelin is marginal to German political
science. Here are two reactions, uttered in my presence, by
German politologues: Professor W.H. relates that when Voegelin
showed him proudly around in the library of his institute in
Munich, he (W.H.) could not suppress the temptation to ask:
"Where are the books on politics?" since most of what he saw
was on gnosticism, religion, oriental myth, or they were
archaeological documents. Another critic, Professor A.M.,
cannot forgive Voegelin his vast "abstractions," his realism
(A.M. is a nominalist), his system-building. In fact, for these
same reasons, Prof. A.M. once attacked Voegelin and the writer
of these lines -- but more vehemently Voegelin for having
switched the spelling of his first name: Eric instead of Erik!
(Intellectuals are less forgiving than rival primadonnas!)

Even far afield (still speaking of Europe), Voegelin is less
than understood, or, if understood, less than fully
appreciated. Mircea Eliade's Diary (Fragments d'un
Journal) contains one reference to him, the kind one
reserves for an eccentric. At their first (only?) meeting
Voegelin spoke of the modern ills as imputable to the revival
of gnosticism, and to nothing else. He was surprised, Eliade
notes, when I was puzzled.

These few markings suffice for a rudimentary outline of
Voegelin's public portrait, or at least caricature. The man is
made of one piece, and this integrality has the label
"scholar." Whenever I saw him, alone or in company, the
impression was unmistakable: old-world courtesy and
the aloofness of the scholar, interested in scholarship alone.
Only there, in that self-drawn magic circle, do his eyes light
up with passion shining in them. When the moment, or the
lecture, is over, there follows a retreat to distracted
politeness, and the mask of attention is worn again. I have it
from a German disciple that the Institute in Munich could have
flourished -- if only director Voegelin had frequented the
Bavarian politicians and City fathers with more assiduity and
ardor. Instead, luncheons agreed on were forgotten -- and
Voegelin was found in his study, reading. Understandably, the
funds got scantier and the jealousies emboldened by his
nonresistance. Which explains why Voegelin told me with genuine
disgust in his voice that he could not stand it in Munich any
more, and preferred Stanford by far. (Obviously, in California
he was sheltered from the necessity of politicking and
administering). The conversation took place in Rome, in 1968,
and we were strolling after a long congressday, in the
direction of the Trinita del Monti (Spanish Steps). Voegelin's
memories seemed indeed bitter, not even softened by by the
respect with which the intellectual right of Italy surrounded
him -- in contrast to the French intellectual right where he
was practically unknown. True, the Italians, north of Rome, are
much more attuned to German scholarship than Frenchmen east of
Paris.

In the United States throughout the last thirty years,
Voegelin has steadily moved from the peripheries to the center,
accompanied by recognition, now bordering on adulation. I once
wrote in a review of one of his books that this phenomena was
to some extent incomprehensible. Americans, scholars included,
respect the specialist, distrust the polyhistor in whom they
suspect, pardon my word, a charlatan. The man who draws with an
equal ease from several disciplines, creates in America an
almost tangible malaise. Voegelin is, of course, such a man,
that is, a "scholar's scholar," who writes the same book
throughout his career, pursues the same gnawing problems,
learns languages, studies new methods, ranges far afield,
invades other territories -- all in order to get nearer the
questions which haunt him. In a different area, Edmund Wilson
was such a man among native Americans. He was, however, a
leftist, thus better tolerated; Voegelin is a "rightist," as a
silly and malevolent review of the New Science of
Politics by Moses Hadas suggested.

But, precisely: is Voegelin a rightist, that is, a
conservative attuned to American conservativism? Besides his
books and lectures let me also refer to his letters to me and
thus piece together an answer. Here is a passage from a note
(February 12, 1969) in which he thanks me for the German
translation (I think) of my book on Sartre, Ideologue of
Our Time:

the first three chapters that I have read are magnificent and
give a splendid insight into the pitiable state of
intellectuals getting old and discovering that they are
empty.

In a second letter, about the same book, he agreed
with me, or rather with St. Augustine whom I quoted, that these
intellectuals and their (gnostic) forebears have engaged in a
fornatico fantastica with ideas -- thus showing the
conservative's judgmental and instinctive recoil from empty
speculation associated with certain leftist/radical literature
and scholarship. In the already-quoted review, Albright too
finds Voegelin in a much profounder sympathy with
Hebrew-Christian tradition than the man to whom he compares
him, Toynbee.

On the other hand, from a letter of Voegelin on November 17,
1970, I concluded that he did not entertain the conservative's
compulsive optimism and the "what can we do about it..."
approach to historical developments. The American variety of
conservatism -- often an updated copy of nineteenth-century
liberalism -- is predicated on the assumption that man is free
to shape destiny, and that it is enough to will events; things
turn our way. In comment on my review of his Science,
Politics, and Gnosticism, Voegelin wrote:

Thank you ever so much for this perceptive review which
indeed brings out the problem that worries me all the time:
whether anything can be done about the intellectual and
spiritual disorientation of the time in an effective manner,
or whether one must let the social process run its course,
with the hope only of perhaps helping this or that man in his
personal troubles. At present, I am rather inclined to
believe that nothing really effective can be done, but that
the philosophical work must go on, in order to keep alive the
possibility of return for those who are willing to turn
around. Whether the situation arises in which such a turning
around becomes socially relevant, however, I do not know...
(But) things simply do not go on in the same way forever. As
an empirical rule one might say that so-called "periods" last
for 250 years. Counting such a "period" from, say 1750, as
marking the opening of the Enlightenment, we should now
approach th time when this "period" has run its course.

The passage is clearly non-conservative (if
anything, it is Platonic): an unfathomable force is at work in
history which leaves us unaware of its motives and changes; a
person may only influence a small and willing circle, but a
large number of persons is subject to an enigmatic law or to
"periods," uncontrollable by us in its or their historical
rhythms. Next to Plato, Giambattista Vico's New
Science comes to mind, or if you call the enigmatic law
"divine providence," you have the Christian view. We also hear
the echo of Plato's Seventh Letter: the
philosophical work must go on in the hope that a few are
willing to turn around. All this is light years away from the
activism it engenders.

Let us leave the matter of Voegelin's conservatism, and
inquire whether he is a "Christian thinker," which would be the
second pillar on which the reverence of conservatives, at least
of the traditionalist kind, would rest. The raising of the
question is legitimate because as a thinker of the German
tradition, it is prudent to ask whether that tradition, in
spite of Voegelin's opposition to Hegel and the Hegelians, did
not leave its mark on him too. After all, "German philosophy,"
long before the officially so-called idealists, that is, since
Meister Eckhart, Cusanus, Schwenckfeld, Oetinger, and then from
Kant to the contemporary theologians -- is united in its effort
to recover the (subjective!) experience of "participation in
the divine reality" (Voegelin's phrase), without positing a
transcendent God whose "I Am Who I Am" makes him independent of
man experiencing him or not. In other words, German philosophy
has been to date the most grandiose enterprise of immanentizing
the divinity, a more devastating enterprise than that of the
clumsy materialists: Marx, or second-rate rebels, from the
philosophes to Sartre. Indeed, comparing Sartre to
Heidegger, one sees clearly the differences of quality of the
atheistic rebellion of the first who sees in God the Great
Bourgeois, a political opponent, and of the second whose aim is
to dissolve God and Platonic ontology in a nihilistic
flux. Of the two, Sartre, with all his viciousness, seems like
a nasty child throwing stones at a funeral procession, while
Heidegger, with a Herr Professor's respectability, is an
immensely dangerous destroyer of the logos and of the
Word.

Thus I was understandably surprised when, six days after the
last-mentioned letter, on November 23, 1970, Voegelin wrote to
me apropos of an article I publishes in Modern Age
("The Cult of the Self"), calling Hegel's, Heidegger's and
Sartre's speculative enterprise "attempts at recovering the
experience of participation in the divine reality," attempts
that "miscarried." I admit that I did not perceive this
attempt; on the contrary, I saw a conscious campaign to replace
the "divine reality" with substitutes like "World Spirit," the
philosopher's "unveiling of Being," or the fusion of
en-soi with the pour-soi. Moreover, I find
that like "value," the term "experience" is the alibi of German
idealists when they wish to avoid speaking of "reality"; it is
the key term to their subjectivism, because while reality is a
tenacious thing, you can do all sorts of things with
experience, even remove it from what we actually experience.
See Husserl's case who "brackets" ordinary experience so that
what remains is indeed "the aging intellectual's discovery of
his own emptiness."

Hebrews and Greeks pierced the cosmos in the direction of the
"unknown God of the beyond," as Voegelin calls him. Was this
God further articulated, made more real, less unknown thanks
to Christian revelation? We are not told, as the Christian
God too was experienced, to be sure in a more
articulate manner, but still only experienced. But so were
the intra-cosmic gods and Socrates' daimon. Is there any
difference?

Incarnation is the reality of divine presence in Jesus as
experienced by the men who were his disciples and
expressed their experience by the symbol "Son of
God" and its equivalents; while Resurrection refers to the
Pauline vision of the Resurrected, as well as to
the other visions which Paul, who knew something
about visions, classified as the same type as his
own. (reviewer's italics).

In my own mind I had come to the very hesitant and
tentative conclusion that there were streaks in Voegelin's
thought which remind the reader of the ambiguities in German
speculation. At that point I read Albright's review of
Order and History which helped to some extent.
Albright actually distinguishes three main strands in
Voegelin's "eclectic philosophy," one of which is the Hegelian.
He finds, however, in favor of Voegelin for two reasons:
Voegelin's concept of Order is more concrete and manageable
than Hegel's Geist, and his theism allows our
philosopher to see the ordering principle as being outside the
world, not immanent as Hegel's. Since Albright regards
historicism [as] pernicious, and leading to self-divinization,
he locates in the Voegelinian opus a healthy antidote.

Let matters rest at that. Anyway, the seventies saw Voegelin
strike out on new endeavors which showed his interest in the
concrete and the wide-ranging. He traveled to Malta, the
Yucatan, to Stonehenge, in pursuit of the relationship between
cosmology and architecture, a relationship shedding direct
light on the way men found and shape their civitas. On
this subject there is as wide a range of documentation as the
wide world of human habitation, but the privileged place for
Western man is Italy, the birthplace of the city in our sense
-- at least until the modern monster appeared with its three
heads, the automobile, the housing project, and Le Corbusier.
The City as a replica of the cosmos is one of mankind's main
preoccupations, is strangled by modern urbanists, but in fact
by our desacralized civilization: the city has become a
temporary convenience, a "facility" (a horrible word)
containing smaller "facilities": prisons, hospitals, schools,
office buildings.

Voegelin's attention thus turned to the fundamental
questions of civilization. One thing must have lead to another
in his mind, not according to the prescriptions of pedantic
research, but with the happy intrusion of imagination and
fantasy. From time to time I received echoes of what had just
captured Voegelin's imagination, through letters ("have you
read Del'Arco's work on Parmigianino, a treasure
house of information on the new sorcery through artists in the
16th century?"); through visits to his library (by coincidence
we were reading Titus Burkhardt's Alchemy at the
same time); through a lecture sponsored by I.S.I. on Karl
Jaspers' "axial years"; through correspondence about a newly
discovered animal thigh-bone (or was it a tibia?) on which
ancient man recorded the phases of stellar motion.

All this shows that Voegelin is the paradigm of the scholar:
forever moving in pursuit of the latest intuition demanding
documentation; then a further digging to yet deeper roots, the
new continuously integrated with the work of a lifetime. Study
never ends. At the age of 79 in 1980, the thank you note for my
latest book testifies:

Theists and Atheists has just arrived. I could
not read it thoroughly in one day [?] but I have gone through
it. I must say this an excellent presentation of the various
isms connected with your central issue [the varieties of
atheism], and I am most grateful to have it as a help in my
own studies concerning the experiences back of the various
isms and of the reality distorted by them.

Then this delightful little glance under the
austere scholar's mask, apropos of an article of mine on the
Marquis de Sade:

...it is excellent, as it stresses the importance of his
appearance in the context of modern intellectualism. I myself
take special pleasure on occasion to irritate people who talk
about the death of God by referring them to Encore un
effort... [a Sadean tract] as the key document that
illuminates the pornographic and criminal purpose of the
deicide.

II

There is a certain ambiguity about Voegelin's fame. I
noticed, for example, that Russell Kirk calls him a historian,
Albright a "philosophical historian," in Germany he is a
Politologe, in America he is often referred to as a
"philosopher." Besides, he is not obviously out of place among
students of religion and mythology; on the other hand, the
philosopher's label does not quite fit if that profession is
tied to the elaboration of formal metaphysics, an epistemology,
an ethical investigation, and a more direct and detailed study
of politics than is provided in various parts of his writings.
As a consequence, Voegelin puzzles many of his readers; they
must be attracted to his ideas and mature through the
experience of modern disorder before they discover him. He
intrigues before he is read.

I noticed this in two very dissimilar milieux, in France and
in South Africa. The French left is too Jacobine and/or Marxist
to read and appreciate the author of From Enlightenment
to Revolution and Science, Politics and
Gnosticism. He would be regarded, if known, as
hopelessly Germanic, but on the wrong side. David Rousset
expressed the judgment if the entire Sartrian generation in an
episode he recounts in Les jours de notre mort,
his captivity in Hitler's concentration camps. He and other
intellectuals managed to engage the guard in conversation (a
way of skipping work for a few minutes) and Rousset told him he
was a professor of philosophy. "Then tell me," said the guard,
"Who is the greatest German philosopher?" "Hegel, of course,"
was the self-assured answer. If this is not quite so any
longer, the new "greatest" are Nietzsche and Heidegger.

As for the French right, the figure of Maurras still so
dominates its intellectual-political landscape that no rival is
admitted. And Maurras detested the Germans, Germany, and the
Germanic spirit. Perhaps the last great German thinker that the
French (Catholic) right admires is Albertus Magnus, teacher of
St. Thomas.

Academic South Africa is split between Anglophones and
Afrikaaners, the first group generally too radical to study
Voegelin, the second, profoundly Calvinistic, too much the
disciples of orthodox theologians -- to accept the legitimacy
of philosophy, which is human wisdom as against divine studies.
Yet on both occasions when I taught in South Africa I was asked
to acquaint my colleagues with Voegelin's teaching -- and they
were exclusively Afrikaaners, very appreciative and interested
ones, although it is an English-speaking South African, E.H.
Wainwright, who devoted his bulky doctrinal dissertation to
Voegelin's ideas.

Finally, in the United States where, as said before, he
offers no less a puzzle to his contemporaries than he will,
most probably, to future generations. Recently, a young and
profoundly reflective scholar, a genuine admirer of Voegelin's
achievement, raised in conversation the the interesting point
whether Voegelin is not, basically, in opposition to the
American tradition of democracy. Indeed, can a disciple of
Plato be anything but an acerbic critic of democracy, of the
excesses it by its nature engenders, and of the tyrannic regime
it calls forth?

The question leads one to assume that, in the foreseeable
future, Voegelin's influence even in his exilic home will
remain limited to a relatively small circle of political
thinkers, able to overcome the temptations of the idola
fori. At any rate, it will be an indirect influence on
most students of politics. It is not only Voegelin's aloof
temperament, it is also the nature of his quest which explains
what he once told me, as I inquired why he does not descend
into the academic arena (we may have more than one reason today
so to phrase it) and teach less infrequently (I meant of course
graduate students): "I refuse to teach illiterates who have
been taught by illiterates!"

III

Is there a "conclusion" to this brief philosophical
portrait, sketched almost entirely with the help of personal
impressions? I can do no better than recopy a passage from a
letter in which, prompted by my questions, Voegelin gave
perhaps the best summary of his teaching. I had formulated the
question after reading the text of his lecture in Pittsburgh,
On Gospel and Truth, enclosed in his letter of
November 23, 1970.

The question by me (with apologies for its length):

Your letters and and lecture focus my attention again on what
I should call the Voegelinian formulation of the present
predicament, and beyond, of the Western problematics... You
recognize two channels through which Western man emerged from
oriental cosmogonies: Israel and Hellas. If you regard these
channels [as] equivalent, and philosophy climaxing in Plato,
then natural reason -- which feeds philosophy -- must by
itself be capable of protecting Western man from attempts to
deform his reason (your expression in Pittsburgh).
If, however, reason "shrivels" (your word) without God, then
philosophy is not sufficient without God's most direct
manifestation, that is, revelation. Indeed, if Plato is the
last word, and if, according to this last word the Cosmos is
the only visible image of God, then two consequences follow:
one, the scientific view of the universe hopelessly overrules
the Platonic view, Descartes defeats Plato; two,a universal
mechanism may be detected which organizes history into
epochs, turning them on and off according to some
periodicity. Thus after Descartes, Hegel too defeats Plato.

My own conclusion is that natural reason is not sufficient
to return us to the life of reason once we are derailed; only
a personal God, acting not via some historical mechanism, but
through the mind and soul of man, can make us "turn
around"...

Voegelin's answer:

"Natural reason" is a theological category. Plato and
Aristotle did not know that their reason was "natural," but
were quite aware of God as the moving reality of their
existence. The medieval opposites of Reason and Revelation
are simply not compatible with the reality of historical
texts. Hence, both Classic Philosophy and Christian
Revelation are "revelation." If I say that both are
"equivalent," that means that they are both expressive of the
fundamental structure of existence. The Gospel conception of
existence, however, has differentiated the problems further
than Classic Philosophy, inasmuch as the eminence of truth
present in existence has been more energetically clarified.
Classic philosophy does not suffer from an insufficient
penetration of experience, but from the hesitation to make
the existential insights the center of philosophy. For both
Plato and Aristotle, the cosmos remains the eminent divine
presence. Hence we have the following situation: Regarding
the analysis of noetic consciousness, Classic Philosophy is
in many points superior to anything the Gospels have
produced; regarding a total view of reality, in which the
truth of noetic consciousness should dominate, the Gospels
are superior to to Classic Philosophy. Hence, Philosophy and
Christianity are not alternatives. We have to face the fact
that truth in history reveals itself not on a single line,
but in complicated patterns, parallels, convergences and
fusions.

One may still agree or disagree. But not on the
fact that in Voegelin we face the paradigmatic
scholar-historian-philosopher, one of the profoundest explorers
of the age.

I recall a brief discussion I had with EV in the late 60's on
Nietzsche. I recall telling EV that I believed that some
philosophers model their writings, consciously or
unconsciously, on a very specific variety of human experience.
I told EV that I felt that Sartre modelled his philosophy on
the experience of a resistence fighter, on the experience of
having to believe that everyone is your enemy and of not being
able to trust anyone. To this, EV just snorted. I then told him
that Nietzsche appears to use dance as the model for philosophy
and that I had written a little paper on Philosophy as Dance in
Nietzsche. I pointed out to EV that Nietzsche described
Zarathustra as a dancer, that he saw himself making a pas de
deux over the ideas of history and that his ideal was described
as the one who 'leaps over'. To this EV said "Of course! I
should have seen it." At which time he had to leave into his
cab. I never got around to asking him about it again.

I am always tempted to tell a story when questions such as
yours arise about how EV once reacted to a request for a
clarification of a word he had just used in a public lecture
back in the late 60's. EV had used a German word in the course
of his lecture. I forget what it was; that is not important. At
the end of the lecture a very sober sounding professor stood up
to ask things like "That word, xxxxx, it is very interesting.
Do you know when it first entered philosophical parlance? Do
you know of any other authors who use it? Would you say that it
is a technical term?" To this long and drawn out dissertation,
which I have significantly abbreviated, EV replied, "What are
you talking about? It means 'light'. It is a very ordinary
word. Children use it. If you want to know what it means, look
it up." With this, EV paused and then added, "All of the words
that I use are ordinary words. If you have difficulty with the
words that I use, look them up ... Next question?"

One weekend in his lecture circuit around Ottawa and Montreal
EV stayed with us, my wife and I. On the Saturday afternoon my
wife and I had to make our way out to buy provisions. EV chose
to stay and relax. I pointed out my rather extensive library of
philosophical and historical works and assumed that he would be
happy mulling through them.

When my wife and I returned, I somehow got around to asking
EV if he had found something interesting to read. He replied,
"Yes, I read this book", pointing to my "Anthology of Pogo". I
had regarded this book that I received as a gift as a quaint
coffee table conversation piece, nothing more. I stood
surprised. I do not remember my exact words but I believe that
I said something to the effect, "Do you mean to tell me that
the renowned scholar Eric Voegelin stayed at my house to read
Pogo cartoons?" To this EV immediately replied, "But this man
is very good." Which, I took to mean that he consided Walt
Kelly, the creator of Pogo, to be very perceptive. I stared at
the book wondering what I had missed and promised myself to
find out what EV was seeing. I am not sure that I ever
have.

Since then I have heard similar stories about EV and Pogo
out of LSU but nothing that might shed light on what EV found
so intriguing.

Martin Sattler, a former graduate student of Eric Voegelin,
has written the following recollection and comment to the
evforum (April 2006) on the recent posthumous publication of
Hans Kelsen's critique of Voegelin's The New Science of
Politics (1952) and published with the almost identical
title, A New Science of Politics [Ontos Verlag,
Frankfurt, 2005].

[Mr. Sattler's abbreviations have been spelled out
here.]

Kelsen wrote his 125 page critique in English. So it wasn't
translated by [Eckhart] Arnold, the editor of the volume.

I have a copy of the original [ms]. Voegelin told me, when
he gave it to me in 1974, that Kelsen was a great scholar and
that he had learnt so much from him dealing with texts.

Voegelin thought indeed that Kelsen was vulnerable if this
critique became publicly known.

"What shall I do with it?" I asked Voegelin.

"Do what ever you want. I think it is not very clear and not
elucidating for Kelsen's well known philosophical
standpoint."

So I did nothing. It reads very defensive and also not very
well informed about the very rich content of The New
Science of Politics.

"Kelsen's argument is very weak," Voegelin said to me.

The last sentences of [Kelsen on page 125 paraphrase the
last page of Voegelin]:

In the catastrophic situation to which gnosticism with its
destruction of the truth of the soul has driven modern
civilization,Voegelin sees -- at the end of his book -- a
glimmer of hope, for the American and English democracies
which most solidly in their institutions represent the truth
of the soul [and] are, at the same time, existentially the
strongest powers (NScP, p.189). This is the -- quite
contradictory -- truth of gnosticism as to the nature of
modernity. It is the end [of] Voegelin's gnostic dream.

How can Kelsen accuse Voegelin of gnosticism if he
argues that the categories of philosophia prima and
Christian faith on the one side and gnostic derailment on the
other are not applicable in political thought in the first
place?

Now that Arnold has published the critique, maybe, we have
to reread and discuss it all.

On page 189 of the original New Science of
Politics Voegelin continues (in 1952):

But it will require all our efforts to kindle this glimmer
into a flame by repressing Gnostic corruption and restoring
the forces of civilization. At present the fate is in the
balance.

Maybe we failed? Do they know in Washington and
London that they should have represented the "truth of the
soul" in their political activities? Did the efforts kindle the
glimmer into a flame? The verdict of Voegelin on modernity is
not contradictory in itself as Kelsen claims but the "efforts"
in politics in the last 54 years might have been not strong
enough.

I've received a very gracious request to share something to
which I alluded in a previous posting, the "Eric Voegelin
Method" of reading the Wall Street Journal. It had never
occurred to me to write it up, which is an absurd oversight
considering what a very great gift to me this short lesson
turned out to be; so I am very grateful indeed for the spur to
attempt it now, and hope to do it justice.

This was on a late November Friday in 1980, and I think it
was the third time I visited the Voegelins at the house on
Sonoma Terrace at Stanford. Considering that I was a perplexed,
obnoxious 27-year-old who had pestered him with several turgid
letters, and considering that I had visited before and had very
likely had little of interest to offer on those previous
occasions, his indulgence and hospitality really have to be
rated well beyond any normal generosity. Lissy Voegelin's
hospitality, of course, was so suffused with sweetness and
grace that far more obnoxious visitors were probably thoroughly
disarmed.

The conversations of these visits were fairly one-sided. I
would ask a question and the answer would have my head spinning
in a few seconds, since it would take off in a direction so
unanticipated that I would barely get my bearings with the
start of the answer by the time the trip came to its end. And
when he did the asking, the questions were just as unexpected,
and my answers probably those of any other village idiot. None
of it was remotely what I expected from reading his works,
which I had been doing on and off since the middle of 1973. But
like the works themselves, even when surprising, perplexing,
challenging, frightening, there was an overwhelming and
compelling substance in the experience that demanded attention
and response.

The "lesson" came after a question from me that I don't
remember, but it must have been the last straw -- I thought I
had "philosophical problems" I wanted to discuss, but this last
question he dismissed with a wave of his hand: "No, no, no,
your problem is exactly the same as my problem, which
is to make money faster than the politicians can steal it from
me. In order to philosophize I need an income. The
first duty of any young person is to try to understand the
world around him, the world he lives in. It is complex --
everything is global! The decision of some bureaucrat half a
world away can destroy your livelihood! If you want to
understand the world around you, you have to do a little
work, you have to go to the sources, just like in any
other investigation." By this time he had gone over to fetch
the day's Journal.

[Digression: on both previous visits, the subject of
newspapers had come up, and I had heard somewhat similar
exhortations. "There are a few good newspapers, the New York
Times, the Wall Street Journal; but you have to read
them -- students don't want to bother." Earlier in the
conversation on this visit, the same topic had arisen, but he
only mentioned the WSJ. I remember asking "New York Times?" He
answered, but without the same enthusiasm, "Also good. But
not the editorial page!"]

We went and stood by the windows onto the patio, where the
light was better. "Look, you can do this in twenty minutes a
day. Start here." He pointed to column 3 on the front page, the
"World-Wide" column under "What's News." He jabbed at the
heading and ran a finger all the way down the column. "You read
all of these. If you want to know more there will be references
to articles inside, but this is the important part. Then you
read the first few of these." He pointed to column 2, the
"Business and Finance" part of "What's News," and ran down
about half the column. "These give you the most important
business developments." Then he turned it over -- I don't think
the paper had yet been split into two sections, but don't quite
remember -- and threw open pages from the back to reach the
editorials. Again he jabbed at the page -- these were not
aggressive jabs, but rather slow & deliberate, yet ever so
slightly depreciative, as if to say "this is merely the
elementary work you must do in order to fulfill your first duty
as a young person!"

This jab was at "Review and Outlook" (the Journal's unsigned
editorials). "You read both of these. And then this
<jab>," the top half Board of Contributors piece, "these
are regular -- top people."

Now earlier in the afternoon, being completely and utterly
innocent of any economic knowledge whatsoever, I had asked
about what to read for the basics, expecting some standard text
like Samuelson, but probably not Samuelson. Yes (it's coming
back now), this is where the newspapers had come up: the
newspaper is the economics textbook -- it's all source
material! This seemed like a staggering job, figuring it all
out from scratch, out of the daily news. "It is all there --
the real reasons that things happen, the things people
say about what happens and why they make their
decisions. There is a good economist, McCrrracken, he writes in
the Wall Street Journal every six or eight weeks, he was Ford's
economic advisor."

So now, pointing at the Board of Contributors space, he
said, "This is where you find Paul McCracken. He's a good
economist, read him. Not [with withering sarcasm] ze
grreat Milton Friedman -- McCrrrracken! Here you find
the thinking that actually lies behind what happens in
the world. You see, these are the people who actually produce,
do the work, that everything depends on. If they decide one day
to stop doing it, the whole world falls apart."

There was a little more along the same lines, his paging
through the welter of commodity prices, exchange rates,
securities quotations, spot prices, and all the rest, saying,
basically, that here was the whole world on the pragmatic
plane, the cost of being in it -- and that mastering it is
simply a general obligation. And somewhere in here was the
remarkable statement I mentioned before, "Do this every day and
in three months you will be better informed than 99% of the
people you will ever encounter for the rest of your life!"

Well, I can't say that has come entirely
true; but then, after all, I have at times slacked off on
reading every single item in the "World-Wide What's News"
column. That must take its toll on the percentages. Still, I
haven't missed an issue in 20 years -- except for Black Monday,
when it was sold out everywhere long before I took my daily
walk to buy the paper. And there have been times when the 99%
figure did seem almost eerily real, like the day after the '94
midterm elections, when everyone I met seemed shell-shocked,
and a friend who was working as a statistician at Cal reported
that ashen-faced university staff were actually walking around
streaming with tears. I had simply assumed that everyone
already knew it would be a bloodbath for the Democrats, and was
quite astonished to find that it came as a surprise to
anyone.

Well, enough of this. Although it can't hope to convey the
massive presence of the man, I suppose in its own way this is
the right centennial tribute, every bit as formative, perhaps
(on a more mundane level), as the exquisite prose that has been
a companion for a quarter of a century. I hope someone out
there finds it useful!

I'd like simply to report his response to youthful questions of
the same sort I asked in 1977 or so. After a brief and pungent
summary of the Aristotelean notion of the spoudaios,
he concluded (with that slight smile and narrowing of the eyes
that always seemed to indicate "you really ought to know better
than to look for an easy answer"), "... so if you wish to know
what is the right thing to do in some specific situation you
put a spoudaios in that situation and you
observe what he does."

Perhaps this is the occaision to recall a couple of my memories
of Eric Voegelin. You must understand it was 1960 and I was a
nineteen year old undergraduate student. To give you the
setting: The classroom was the ground floor auditorium of the
Law school building at Notre Dame. American Oxford Gothic
architecture. The classroom ran the whole width of the building
so there were rows of windows on both sides. In the front
center was a stage with proscenium arch and stairs leading up
at either side. On the stage was a desk, a lectern and a
blackboard. There were 80 or 100 students in the class in a
room that would have held 400 or so. We sat in rows of theater
seats. As far as I recall, Dr. Voegelin always wore a three
piece suit. Bob Cihak took a picture once in class and he has
promised to make it available.

Here is one recollection. It was a Monday morning. The class
bell rang and Dr. Voegelin was not poised at the lecturn ready
to begin, as was his custom. Instead he paced back and forth,
removed his glasses and pinched the bridge of his nose. He put
his glasses back on and turned in our general direction and
said: "I watched television Friday night and I have not yet
recovered!"

I never forgot that and, in 1986 when our TV broke down, we
never went back to watching broadcast television. The
withdrawal symptoms affected me for at least a year after
that.

In 1991 Paul Caringella told me that in his later years, EV
used to occaisonally watch a TV program without ill-effect.
Just so long as he wasn't required to remember it!

One day I went to class (still in the law school
auditorium)--on a Wednesday, as I recall--and there was a
notice posted on the door that class would not meet until the
next class day (Friday). This was unusal because EV was always
reliable and punctual. Also, his was the only class that I
never cut.

On Friday when class began I noticed that EV had a bright
red mark on the bridge of his nose and another on the right
side of his forehead. Class went as usual and he said
nothing.

That weekend we learned that he had been attacked by muggers
while walking between his apartment and the University. We were
angry and wanted to do something to help. We learned that
graduate students were already providing him with a bodyguard.
There was nothing we could do.

Almost immediately Theodore M Hesburgh CSC, the President of
the University and the man who was instrumental in bringing EV
to Notre Dame, ordered that accomodations be prepared for him
at the Morris Inn, a hotel at the edge of campus for visitors
and alumni. Since the Morris Inn rooms were small and rather
spartan, I believe they must have knocked down some walls in
order to create enough connected space to call an
"apartment."

Ten years ago I learned from Paul Caringella that EV told
him that he was beaten because he had no money to give the
robbers. After that, he made it a point to carry $100 with him
at all times so that he could reward a robber for his labor and
avoid a beating!

In 1960 or '61, in those days of my youth, friendship was easy
and undemanding. We only asked for cordiality and sympathy and
humor.

I had a friend whom I will call Tom. He was an able student
in the General Studies program at Notre Dame. One of his
shortcomings was that he liked guns perhaps too much. In fact,
he was required at one point to remove from his residence hall
a 9mm Luger automatic pistol together with its box of
ammunition.

I had been trying to persuade Tom to come with me and audit
one of Voegelin's lectures. It was a Monday morning, I think,
and over the weekend, an Alabama sheriff named Bull Conner had
used dogs and electric cattle prods to break up a negro civil
rights demonstration. It had all been captured by TV cameras
and it was unpleasant to see.

When we arrived Voegelin was already on the stage of the law
school auditorium, striding back and forth, obviously agitated
and distracted. When the class bell rang he stopped striding
and turned to us. In a loud voice he said: "Someone should go
down there with machine guns and teach them a lesson!" Of
course the "them" were the redneck segregationists.

When EV said this I looked at Tom and Tom was looking at me.
He had this wicked, sly grin on his face. And I thought to
myself, why did I have to bring Tom of all people to this
particular lecture?

I later learned that EV was cautioned when he began his
career in Alabama to keep quiet about race issues. It must have
been exceedingly difficult for him, since he knew more and had
written more about race theory nonsense than probably any other
living man!! In fact his books on race were perhaps the chief
reason he had to "escape in his socks" from the Nazis
Gestapo.

"WE HAVE MET THE ENEMY AND THEY ARE OURS." -- Oliver Hazard
Perry, letter to General Harrison after the victory over the
British fleet at Lake Erie, 1813.

Forty odd years ago, when I was a very sophisticated, but
shy, nineteen year old, I wandered into the public cafeteria at
the Notre Dame South Dining Hall. It was about 10:00 o'clock in
the morning. I had stayed up late (probably in a bull session)
and had slept through breakfast so I came to the cafeteria to
get coffee and a roll. The cafeteria was a rackety place, with
terra cotta floors and brick walls and vaulted gothic ceilings
frescoed with pioneer priests greeting Indians. The tables and
chairs were heavy oak. It was the kind of place where, if the
kitchen helper dropped a tray of silver, the noise hurt your
ears.

But on this morning at this time of day the cafeteria was
almost empty. As I walked along heading for the tables, I saw
professor Voegelin sitting at a table reading the newspaper. He
could have been upstairs in the private faculty dining room if
he had wished, but he was down here in the public room. I don't
know why I did it, but I thought it would be nice to sit at the
same table so I walked up and said: "May I sit here,
Professor?" He looked around quickly and then nodded without
really looking up from his paper, which was spread wide open in
front of him, held up with both hands. I sat down and started
to drink my coffee. I certainly was not going to bother this
lofty figure; I was determined to keep my mouth shut.

As I sat there, I sort of leaned forward casually to see
what Professor Voegelin was reading. I was so startled that I
forgot myself and practically shouted: "Why Professor Voegelin,
you're reading the funnies!" Scarcely missing a beat and
without looking up, he tapped one of the cartoon panels with
his forefinger and said, "Yes, this 'Pogo' is very good."

'Pogo' was the daily cartoon strip drawn by Walt Kelly. I
believe Kelly drew and wrote from somewhere in Louisiana. His
characters were swamp creatures which might be found not too
far from Baton Rouge where Voegelin spent a large part of his
teaching life. I believe it was Kelly who coined the phrase
which he put in the mouth of Pogo: "We have met the enemy, and
they is us!"

In October of 1992, I decided to visit my son who was then
living in Oakland, California. Oakland is across the bay from
San Francisco and I had never before visited this beautiful
area of the United States. I thought it would be a nice
opportunity to meet Paul Caringella, Eric Voegelin's personal
assistant for many years, so I called him from my home in Ohio
and arranged to meet him at Stanford University in Palo Alto, a
city just south of San Francisco. With my son beside me, I
finally got to meet Paul at the Hoover Institution on the
Stanford campus. He took us to the cemetery where Eric Voegelin
had been buried in January of 1985. It was on a hill top with a
lovely vista. One could see many miles across valleys to the
distant hills. It was the kind of beauty for which California
is famous. A single small wind-blown tree broke the horizon.
Nothing else impaired the view: no monuments, only simple flat
headstones. Paul pointed out the headstone for the man lying
next to Voegelin. It said simply, "Wiseman."

Later my son and I, and a visiting friend of my son from
Baden, Germany, a young electrical engineer named Ulrich, went
with Paul to visit Lissy Voegelin at the Voegelin home in Palo
Alto. We came by appointment and Lissy awaited us sitting up in
bed in the master bedroom. She looked elegant and regal in a
blue robe, with her freshly permed thick white hair.

Lissy said she never spoke German anymore (I believe she
said that she and Eric made it a rule to talk together only in
English.) But in the case of Ulrich, when he stepped forward to
be introduced, she took his hand and said a few things to him
"auf Deutsch."

Paul told Lissy that I had some memories of Eric at Notre
Dame back about 1960 and Paul thought Lissy would enjoy them;
enthusiastically she encouraged me to share my memories. To put
a time frame around events I asked her if she remembered when
Eric was beaten by muggers as he walked in the night from
school to their apartment. Of course she remembered all this
very clearly. It was shortly after this that that my story
takes place. This is the story I told Lissy:

"I took Professor Voegelin's "New Science of Politics"
course when I was a junior undergraduate at Notre Dame. I
decided I would buy extra copies of THE NEW SCIENCE OF POLITICS
and give them as Christmas gifts to friends. I thought it would
be great if I could have them signed by Professor Voegelin, so
I went up to him after class one day (as far as I recall the
only time I ever spoke to him in the classroom) and asked him
if he would be willing to autograph copies of his book? He
glanced at his pocket calender and told me to come to his
apartment the following day at 1:00 P.M. "

(I still clearly recall the appointment was for a Saturday.
By this time the Voegelin's had moved into the Morris Inn for
safety as a result of the mugging incident already mentioned.
The Morris Inn was a low budget functional cinderblock motel
for weekend guests. Father Hesburg, the then university
president, had ordered some walls knocked down to combine
individual guest rooms into a single habitable apartment.)

"Promptly at one o'clock I knocked at the Voegelin's door.
The door opened narrowly and a graduate student stood there
blocking my view. I still remember the scowl on his face when I
told him I had an appointment. He told me to wait. Then I was
led into a foyer or anti-room located at the center of a kind
of rabbit warren of low ceilings and narrow halls and
doorways.

"I stood there with my armload of books for a few minutes
and into the room bounded Professor Voegelin wearing his
three-piece suit and a public smile (I sensed he had just put
on the jacket.). He sat in a small upholstered chair and rubbed
his hands together enthusiastically.

'Well! What do we have here today?' he asked.

"I told him I had these books for him to sign. I handed him
four copies of the NEW SCIENCE. ( He signed with a ball point
pen he took from his coat pocket. I hadn't had the presence of
mind to bring a fountain pen. Nor did I have the presence of
mind to suggest a sentiment or even a date on any of the
copies.)

'There you are,' he said, handing back the slender blue
volumes.

'Would you also sign these, Professor?'

I offered him my three volumes of ORDER AND HISTORY (There
were only three then!). He took them and looked at them
speculatively, flipping open one of the volumes.

'You don't expect me to sign all of them, do you?'

'Yes, please' I said.

But it is customary for an author to sign ONLY the first
volume of a multi-volume work. ' "

At this point, Lissy Voegelin interrupted my story:

"I hope you made him sign! You did make him sign?" "Yes, I
said, "he signed them all."

"Good!" she said, "I'm glad you made him do it."

When the visit with Lissy was over, we filed out of the
room. I was the last to leave. I stopped and looked at her and
she at me. For a moment the masks fell away and we looked at
each other with tenderness and sadness. Then I left her home
and returned to Ohio.

I pray for the repose of Eric and Lissy at the memorial of
every mass.